It’s a strong possibility. I remember being one of the few people actually being somewhat worried about it, and saying “maybe taking two weeks to see how serious this is wouldn’t hurt,” while everyone else said “LMAO, RETARD, THE MEDIA SAYS ITS OK. RACIST RETARD”

Then, after two weeks, I was like “you know, this actually isn’t as bad as we thought it was going to be, let’s go back to life as normal.” And everyone else was like “BUT THE TV MAN TOLD ME WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! OH MY GOD, GET THE TOILET PAPER!”

China spread the seeds to conspiracy type folks. They were spreading all these videos of overflowing hospitals, people falling over dead, welded into their homes, etc. How does a country with such absolute control over their internet, people, and media have constant leaks like this? Simple, the CCP was doing it. CCP seeded these videos all over darker places of the internet (imageboards, small forums, etc) to let those people make something of it.

And I hate them for it, it worked so fucking well.

For about a month at the beginning no one knew what the fuck it was. The governments weren't investigating it and the media was ignoring it most likely purposefully. The prudent action was to treat it with caution until more information was gathered and the actual scientific community at large had a chance to study it and figure out what it was and how deadly it would be. Needless to say the federal level scientific community are fucking useless and bungled the whole initial phase of information gathering also likely intentionally. Anyway after the first month or two and 4 out of 10 people weren't dropping dead in their tracks the governments should have backed off and let the public decide as individuals what level of protection and safety precautions were appropriate for each of themselves.

This has been my point for a while.

You might be right. Because when we first started hearing about the virus, 4chan and other sites were flooded with videos of Chinese people dropping dead in the streets, or whole rooms full of people shaking uncontrollably. Obviously, that didn't happen here. So either the videos were fake, or spread as misinformation. They know how information gets around on the internet. It starts on the image boards, then makes its way to the mainstream sites like Twitter and facebook. There was a coordinated attempt to legitimize this virus and make everyone extremely scared of it

I've had this thought too. It can not be fake AND a bio-weapon. Maybe the bio-weapon story was actually leaked from china to increase it's effectiveness as an economic weapon. It's the only way I can reconcile the two narratives. It doesn't work the other way around. We have significant evidence that the virus is largely bullshit. No solid evidence other than hearsay regarding the bio-weapon.