BEIJING — Following yet another pile of evidence suggesting coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the remorseful People's Republic of China tried sending over another "We're Sorry For Creating COVID" balloon to their friends in America.
General Secretary Xi Jinping was reportedly "velly solly" for botching an innocent, surreptitious population control measure meant to only decimate his own citizens.
"We thought it was plainly obvious the engineered supervirus came from our lab in Wuhan. Only a moron would think otherwise," said a Chinese official with a name we gave up trying to pronounce. "We've been sending apology letters to our colleague Dr. Fauci for years, asking him to read them on TV, but he says they keep getting lost in the mail."
Exhausted balloon engineers were reportedly working on a design that would safely make it past U.S. military defenses, as previous prototypes had been shot down.
"Our latest apology balloon was shaped like a big heart, but everyone thought it was an influencer's stupid Valentine's Day stunt, which is fair," said the chief balloon engineer whose name looked like a cool calf tattoo. "We almost launched a vessel rigged with a robust anti-missile system to help it survive the trip to the American heartland, but we scrapped it after realizing you might get the wrong idea."
At publishing time, a humbled General Secretary Xi Jinping relented and allowed the launch of a balloon shaped like Winnie The Pooh to show he "trury means it."
Citing concerns about stiff competition from Amazon and an impossible-to-please Gen Z, Santa has announced he's hanging up the hat for good.
