Global Research, January 25, 2020
The Western mass media have
discussed the new corona virus that began in the city of Wuhan in Central China
but, apart from repetitive small details and the inevitable China-bashing, not
much light has been shed on the circumstances. My initial commentary here is
composed from a medley of nearly 100 Western news reports, primarily ABC, CBS,
CNN, AFP, and from some Chinese media. Officially called the novel coronavirus
(2019-nCoV), the contagion is a respiratory illness, a new type of viral pneumonia,
in the same family of infections as SARS and MERS.
At the time of writing, Chinese
health authorities announced 830 confirmed cases caused by this virus in 29
provincial-level regions in the country, resulting so far in 25 deaths
primarily among the elderly who had been suffering serious prior medical
conditions and were perhaps in weakened physical states. A few cases have been
reported in other countries, Thailand, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, the US,
Japan, all of which involved ethnic Chinese who had traveled to Wuhan. The
virus initially showed no signs of spreading between humans, but then may have
mutated with 15 medical workers in Wuhan apparently contracting the pathogen
from other victims. It still remains unclear how easy it is to contract it from
another infected individual.
The initial symptoms were mild,
which permitted many people to travel before stronger symptoms were detected.
The first occurrences in December thus appeared to be of minor concern. The
incubation period has not been definitively stated but, once infections began,
the spread was surprisingly rapid after the first case was confirmed on
December 31: on January 3, 44 cases; January 21, 225 cases, January 24, 830
cases. Local medical authorities have said the true extent of the Wuhan
coronavirus is unclear, and the early official figures may have been an
underestimation since the mild symptoms and delayed onset meant infections may
have been undetected.
All the evidence suggests the
Chinese authorities acted effectively as soon as they realised the danger they
might be facing. Medical authorities immediately declared the outbreak, and
within a week they had identified the pathogen and also determined and shared
the genome sequence with the WHO and other parties, a sufficiently speedy
response that earned praise from the WHO and scientists around the world.
Remembering the SARS troubles, they
did much more. In most large centers in the country, all sports venues,
theaters, museums, tourist attractions, all locations that attract crowds, have
been closed, as have all schools. All group tours have been cancelled. Not only
the city of Wuhan but virtually the entire province of Hubei has been locked
down, with all trains, aircraft, buses, subways, ferries, grounded and all
major highways and toll booths closed. Thousands of flights and train trips
have been cancelled until further notice. Some cities like Shanghai and Beijing
are conducting temperature tests on all roadways leading into the cities. In
addition, Wuhan is building (in five days) a portable hospital of 25,000 square
meters to deal with the infected patients. As well, Wuhan has asked citizens to
neither leave nor enter the city without a compelling reason, and all are
wearing face masks.
The scale of the challenge of
implementing such a blockade is immense, comparable to closing down all
transport links for a city 5 times the size of Toronto or Chicago, two days
before Christmas. These decisions are unprecedented, but testify to the
determination of the authorities to limit the spread and damage of this new
pathogen. They not only address the gravity of the situation but also the
seriousness of consideration for the public health, unfortunate and difficult
decisions since the holiday is being destroyed for hundreds of millions of people.
Most public entertainment has been cancelled, as have tours, and many weddings
as well. The damage to the economy during this most festive of all periods,
will also be enormous. Hong Kong will suffer severely in addition to all its
other troubles, since visits from Mainland Chinese typically support much of
its retail economy during this period.
The Chinese New Year is the most
important festival for Chinese. Saturday, January 25, is the first day of the
Lunar New Year, a festive period that typically sees the largest mass-movement
of people on the planet as Chinese flock back to their hometowns to be with
relatives. No health authority has ever tackled the challenge currently faced
by China, as the country grapples with a new coronavirus just as hundreds of
millions prepare to travel.
And of course the Western media had
a field day of schadenfreude. CNN published a report – a bit too gleefully, I
thought – on the potential damage to China’s economy: (1)
“China’s economy is slumping and the country is still
suffering the effects of the trade war with America. An outbreak of a new and
deadly virus is the last thing it needs. The Wuhan coronavirus has already
roiled Chinese markets and thrown plans for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday
into chaos for millions of people. The world’s second biggest economy grew at
its slowest pace in nearly three decades last year as it contended with rising
debt, cooling domestic demand and US tariffs, many of which remain in place
despite a recent truce. Beijing is worried about unemployment, too, and has
announced a wave of stimulus measures in recent weeks aimed at preventing mass
layoffs. . . The Wuhan coronavirus outbreak could spark widespread fear and
spur people to hunker down and avoid going outside. That kind of behavior would
deal a huge blow to the service sector, which now accounts for about 52% of the
Chinese economy.” [And so on . . .]
The Western media have already staked out their claim
to the fundamentals, all media sources claiming the virus was transferred to
humans from animals or seafood. The media have added fuel to the fire by
claiming the virus emerged from “illegally traded wildlife” in a market “where
offerings reportedly include wild animals that can carry viruses dangerous to
humans”, and that this virus “jumped into the human population from an infected
animal”. Chinese officials stated that the virus appears to have originated at
a seafood market in Wuhan, though the actual origin has not been determined nor
stated by the authorities, and is still an open question perhaps primarily
since viruses seldom jump species barriers without human assistance.
While there is no evidence of biowarfare, a virus
outbreak in the city of Wuhan immediately prior to the Chinese New Year
migration could potentially have dramatic social and economic repercussions.
Wuhan, with a population of about 12 million, is a major transport hub in
Central China, particularly for the high-speed train network, and with more
than 60 air routes with direct flights to most of the world’s major cities, as
well as more than 100 internal flights to major Chinese cities. When we add
this to the Spring Festival travel rush during which many hundreds of millions
of people travel across the country to be with their families, the potential consequences
for the entire country are far-reaching.
Comparison
with SARS
This is a novel Coronavirus
(2019-nCoV), an entirely new strain related to the MERS (MERS-CoV) and the SARS
(SARS-CoV) viruses, though early evidence suggests it is not as dangerous.
SARS was proven to be caused by a
strain of the coronavirus, a large family of mostly harmless viruses also
responsible for the common cold, but SARS exhibited characteristics never
before observed in any animal or human virus, did not by any means fully match
the animal viruses mentioned above, and contained genetic material that still
remains unidentified – similar to this new corona virus in 2019.
Virologist
Dr. Alan Cantwell wrote
at the time that “the mysterious SARS virus is a new virus never before seen by
virologists. This is an entirely new illness with devastating effects on the
immune system, and there is no known treatment.” Dr. Cantwell also noted that
the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and
military labs for decades. He wrote that when he searched in PubMed for the
phrase “coronavirus genetic engineering”, he was referred to 107 scientific
experiments dating back to 1987. To quote Dr. Cantwell:
“I quickly confirmed scientists have been genetically
engineering animal and human coronaviruses to make disease-producing mutant and
recombinant viruses for over a decade. No wonder WHO scientists identified the
SARS/coronavirus so quickly. Never emphasised by medical news writers is the
fact that for over forty years scientists have been “jumping species” with all
sorts of animal and human viruses and creating chimera viruses (viruses
composed from viruses of two different species). This unsupervised research
produces dangerous man-made viruses, many of which have potential as
bioweapons. Certainly SARS has the hallmarks of a bioweapon. After all, aren’t
new biological warfare agents designed to produce a new disease with a new
infectious agent? As in prior military experiments, all it might take … to
spread SARS is an aerosol can . . .” (2) (3) (4)
Almost immediately upon receiving
the genome sequence, several Russian scientists suggested a link between SARS
and biowarfare. Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical
Sciences, said the propagation of the SARS virus might well have been caused by
leaking a combat virus grown in bacteriological weapons labs. According to a
number of news reports, Kolesnikov claimed that the virus of atypical pneumonia
(SARS) was a synthesis of two viruses (of measles and infectious parotiditis or
mumps), the natural compound of which was impossible, that this mix could never
appear in nature, stating, “This can be done only in a laboratory.” (5) And
Nikolai Filatov, the head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, was quoted in
the Gazeta daily as stating he believed SARS was man-made because “there is no
vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread
and the population is not immune to it.” (6) (7)
It wasn’t widely reported, but it
seems the final conclusion of the Chinese biochemists was the same, that the
SARS virus was man-made. This conclusion wasn’t a secret, but neither was it
promoted to the international media since they would simply have used the claim
to heap scorn on China, dismissing this as a paranoid conspiracy theory. The
Western media totally ignored this aspect, except for ABC news who reported
that the SARS “Mystery Virus” was possibly “a Chinese bio-weapon that accidentally
escaped the laboratory”. Nice of ABC to notice, but their story, if true, would
be the first example of a nation creating and releasing a race-specific
biological weapon designed to attack exclusively itself.
Notable is that while SARS spread to
about 40 countries, the infections in most countries were few and deaths almost
zero, and it was exclusively (or almost exclusively) Chinese who were infected,
those in Hong Kong most seriously, with Mainland China suffering little by
comparison.
This appears to be precisely the
case with this new virus, in that most of the infected persons (sofar) are
Chinese. News reports speak of infections appearing in Thailand or the US, but
those (at least to date of writing) were all Chinese who had been to Wuhan.
There have been no cases so far of infected Caucasians.
As with SARS, this new virus
appears to be tightly-focused to Chinese. At this stage it is too early to draw
specific conclusions.
We might in other circumstances
pass this off as an unfortunate coincidence but for some major circumstantial
events that serve to alter our focus. One of these is the history of American
universities and NGOs having come into China in recent years to conduct
biological experiments that were so illegal as to leave the Chinese authorities
enraged. This was particularly true when it became known that Harvard
University had surreptitiously proceeded with experiments in China that had
been forbidden by the authorities years earlier, where they collected many
hundreds of thousands of Chinese DNA samples and then left the country. (8) (9)
(10) (11) (12)
The Chinese were furious to learn
that Americans were collecting Chinese DNA. The government intervened and
prohibited the further export of any of the data. The conclusion at the time
was that the ‘research’ had been commissioned by the US military with the DNA
samples destined for race-specific bio-weapons research.
In a thesis on Biological Weapons, Leonard Horowitz and Zygmunt Dembek stated that one clear
sign of a genetically-engineered bio-warfare agent was a disease caused by an
uncommon (unusual, rare, or unique) agent, with lack of an epidemiological
explanation. I.e. no clear idea of source. They also mentioned an “unusual
manifestation and/or geographic distribution”, of which race-specificity would
be one. (13)
Recent disease outbreaks that would
seem to possibly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents are AIDS, SARS, MERS,
Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio
(Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA. And in fact
thousands of prominent scientists, physicians, virologists and epidemiologists
on many continents have concurred that all these viruses were lab-created and
their release deliberate. The recent swine flu epidemic in China has the
hallmarks as well, with circumstantial evidence of the outbreak raising only
questions.
There was another curiosity in this
case, in that additional to the usual criticisms of China being inactive or
secretive, several US media replicated accusations from “a senior US State
Department official” claiming Washington was “still concerned” about
transparency in the Chinese government on the Wuhan coronavirus. Other articles
claimed the US CDC was “concerned that Chinese health officials have still not
released basic epidemiological data about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak,
making it more difficult to contain the outbreak.” There is no substantial
reason that officials at any level of the US State Department should concern
themselves with a virus outbreak in a foreign country.
Their criticisms were surprisingly
detailed, demanding specifics on the number of infections directly from contact
with the Wuhan market, the number of person-to-person infections, the precise
incubation period from exposure to the onset of symptoms, the point at which
persons become contagious. The questions were presented in benevolent terms of
helping the Chinese medical authorities deal with the virus, though it was
already self-evident China had no need to be lectured on such basics.
As of the date of writing, details
are still too scarce to form definitive conclusions but, in every such case,
once the smoke clears there are many unanswered questions that challenge the
official Western narrative, but it’s old news and the media have already staked
out their ground so the matter dies in the Western public mind, but not in
China.
*
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman.
He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and
owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor
at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international
affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently
writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can
be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global
Research.
Notes
(1) The Wuhan virus is the last
thing China’s economy needs …
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/23/economy/wuhan-coronavirus-china-economy/index.html
(2)
u2.lege.net/whale.to/c/cantwell_alan.html
(3) https://medicalveritas.org/rigged-science-man-made-aids
(4)
https://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Doctors-Death-Inquiry-Epidemic/dp/0917211251
(5)
https://rense.com/general37/manmade.htm
(6)
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/21/new-improved-sars-bioweapon-tested-in-china
(7)
https://rense.com/general37/bio.htm
(8) The Harvard case of Xu Xiping:
exploitation of the people, scientific advance, or genetic theft?
Margaret Sleeboom; Amsterdam School
of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam and International Institute
for Asian Studies, University of Leiden, The Netherlands; Routlege; Taylor
& Francis group; New Genetics and Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, April 2005
(9) http://ahrp.org/article-30/
(10)
http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-09/25/content_267233.htm
(11)
http://www.ahrp.org/ethical/ChinaDaily092503.php
(12)
http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-09/25/content_267233.htm
(13) Medical Aspects of Biological
Warfare
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