The virus debate saw China’s massive efforts at obfuscation. The CPC’s propaganda department, like almost all others, is not very smart. Showing off can be counterproductive.
Chinese Whispers was once a party game. A message emerges at the end of a line of people amusingly garbled, proving that facts or a story tend to get twisted over time and distance. We live in a Covid-ravaged world of confidence intervals, of mathematical models and curves, of uncertainty principles. The media has started criticizing social media for criticizing the media for not criticizing scientists, for criticizing the non-scientists who criticized the scientists for not saying it was a laboratory leak.
When we find that science, humanity and ethics have been thumped by politics, ambition, and greed, we lose faith, and hope. The people and institutions we trusted have let us down. When everyone is guilty, no one is. Collective culpability conceals the truth. The virus debate saw China’s massive efforts at obfuscation. The first totally irrelevant argument was about the method of transmission. China promoted the narrative that the virus spread from a wet market (seafood and animal market) in Wuhan (to avoid any scrutiny of what was being done in the Wuhan Institute of Virology).
So, the virus was zoonotic (spreading from animals to humans) with no evidence of human-to-human transmission. China’s WHO flunkey nodded his head so vigorously that it is a wonder it did not fall off. A US senator recently asked: if you held PingPong upside down and shook him hard, would the WHO fall out of his pocket? When hundreds of thousands of people in Europe and Asia and America who do not eat bats began to fall ill, the lords in Beijing and their WHO parrot grudgingly acknowledged that it could be anthroponoses, spreading from one person to another.
With transmission channels settled, the focus then shifted to the origin of the virus. Did Shri and Smt Bat produce this deadly pathogen while hanging upside down in the Yunnan caves, and then fly 1,000 km to the wet market in Wuhan (they can travel usually up to 50 km) to begin attacking people who then infected millions of others?
Or did the infamous Bat Woman and her cohorts manufacture the lethal Sars Covid 2 with US funding in their laboratory in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (China’s most important laboratory for the study of emerging viruses) very close to the wet market?
With funding from Dr Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, China’s leading virologist (trained in America) set out to create novel coronaviruses in her Wuhan laboratory (the objective of her research is in the public domain) with the highest possible infectivity for human cells.
The Chinese swore that it was of natural origin, but when a very pliant WHO team visited Wuhan in February 2021, they found no evidence to support the natural emergence theory. The team included a rather shady fellow called Peter Daszak, president of the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, who funneled federal US grants to the Wuhan Institute for controversial “gain-of-function” research—altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious. Sending him is like asking the prime suspect to investigate a crime.
Media reports refer to a leaked 2015 Chinese military document on developing a pathogen-based bioweapon to cripple the adversary’s medical system. China began work, according to these reports, on weaponizing a virus in 2016-2017. The present man who heads WHO was elected in 2017. The 1999 Chinese military book “Unrestricted Warfare”, says the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden, not even the use of a virus.
In the early 1950s, the legendary Alexander Legmuir, chief epidemiologist at the then newly established CDC worried about enemies carpeting US cities in airborne pathogens, and wrote that if someone wanted to turn a nasty pathogen into a weapon of mass infection, they could formulate it into a liquid that could be aerosolized.
Now comes the third and most important issue. Did it leak accidentally from a laboratory with poor safety levels, since viruses are master escape artists, or was it deliberately pandemicized to test its potency on humans? Sounds far-fetched? Please see the 1999 Hollywood film Bats, in which a demented scientist genetically modifies bats to become the ultimate predators, specifically targeting humans. His creation kills him.
Intelligence reports suggest that staff messing around with the pathogen at the laboratory in Wuhan, the epicentre of the deadly virus ravaging our planet, had sought hospitalization for an undiagnosed serious pneumonia-like infection in autumn 2019, weeks before China acknowledged the existence of the virus and alerted the WHO on 31 December 2019. The December 2019 documentary “Youth in the World: Invisible Defence Line Defender” was obviously a propaganda film about China’s growing scientific prowess. The final caption proves this: Only 2,284 types of viruses were discovered worldwide over 200 years, while China’s CDC discovered nearly 2,000 types in just 12 years, therefore China leads the world in virus research. It was intended to reassure domestic and global audiences that the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” was well under way under Virus Pong’s leadership. The protagonist claims that trapping the virus is a true battle to strengthen China’s defences without the smoke of gunpowder (remember a fellow called Sun Tzu?).
The CPC’s propaganda department, like almost all others, is not very smart. Showing off can be counterproductive. In the mid-1980s, a former US military fellow advertised his school for guerillas on TV and showed Sikhs being trained. You can guess our reaction.
A forensic analysis about the virus’ origin, lethality, spread and treatment, could prevent another catastrophe in the future. Three things cannot be hidden for long, said the Gautama, the sun, the moon and the truth. How do we constrain rogues like China is the million-dollar question, and there are more than a million answers. Will China come clean? If it admits that it was a laboratory leak, it would be enormously damaged, explode the myth of its self-proclaimed superior system, destroy the Communist Party, shatter God PingPong’s reputation, and even prosecution for crimes against humanity since biological warfare is prohibited under customary international humanitarian law and several international treaties.
By 7 January 2020, the Supreme Leader knew enough about the origin of the outbreak to personally take charge (instead of leaving it to the health authorities) and ordered the Wuhan market to be shut and sanitized several times. Two weeks later he locked down 11 million people (the largest lockdown ever) to prevent the virus from spreading within China, but ordered thousands of Chinese expatriates who had come home for the new year to rush back. His lackey, the head of WHO, begged countries not to sever airlinks with China. An unsuspecting world continues to pay the price.
As more and more fingers point at Wuhan, China’s Biosecurity Law came into effect on 15 April 2021, China’s National Security Education Day. The law prohibits lab animals from being sold in markets.
Genetic manipulation seems so easy now. In 1996, there was so much impassioned debate about Dolly, the cloned sheep. Some scientific experiments have had unintended consequences, leading to the discovery of penicillin, Viagra, the birth control and sleeping pills, anti-depressants, LSD. The final stage testing on humans is done all the time. As per Eileen Welson’s 1999 book, The Plutonium Files, from the early 1940s into the 1960s, thousands of unsuspecting or poorly informed Americans became nuclear guineapigs—some of them unharmed, others badly damaged. And now hundreds of leaked emails of the god of viruses Dr Anthony Fauci have made confusion worse confounded (thank you John Milton in Paradise Lost) indicating that he suppressed warnings that the virus came from a laboratory.
After closing a State Department inquiry, the President has just ordered a new intelligence investigation, following a Senate committee hearing that the US collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to make a more deadly, transmittable coronavirus.
With accidents in US biolabs in the early 2010s, in October 2014 the US government placed a moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.
Dr Anthony Fauci outsourced the GOF research to the Wuhan lab in 2015 with federal funding since it was easier and less politically risky to let China (then still lovey-dovey with America) do it, as it is a closed system not susceptible to public scrutiny (and has enough conniving scientists). Its records have been sealed.
America likes to keep its dirty secrets and trash (plastic waste, e-garbage, and nuclear litter) away from the homeland, far from the prying eyes of the legislature, judiciary, and media. Now, the shit has hit the Chinese fan. As pressure mounts on China, since the world wants to know just what was going on in Wuhan (with the US supporting the demand at least publicly), China’s spokesman retorts in May 2021 that the US should invite WHO experts to study virus origins and explain their more than 200 biolabs all over the world (implying that the leak could have been from any of those labs).
This information could only have come from the Bat Woman who knows every US secret about bioweapons. So, China now wants another debate to deflect attention from its culpability. Remember China’s officials furiously claiming as early as November 2020 that while the virus may have been discovered it China, it did not originate there? The Chinese Communists are too clever by half, and the God, with Chinese characteristics, can do no wrong.
The world is sick of terrorism of whatever variety, the latest is bioterrorism, biological weapons that disseminate disease-causing organisms or toxins to harm or kill humans, animals or plants. In addition to the tragic loss of lives, such events could cause food shortages, environmental catastrophes, devastating economic loss, and widespread illness, fear and mistrust among the public. In April 2020, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: China’s Communist Party will pray the price for not sharing information they had about the coronavirus pandemic and thus causing a “huge challenge” for economies. The actual damage to the global economy now being talked about is several trillion dollars. Many countries went into months of lockdown in 2020 in a bid to stem the spread of Covid-19, which accelerated job losses. All of China’s hard and soft power projection attempts are unraveling. Finding his nation with its pants down, in June 2021 Xi asks his dumb officials to abandon wolf warrior activity and create a more respectable, trustworthy and lovable image of China.
There is no doubt that the Wuhan virus is a biological weapon, with Chinese characteristics–ruthless, cunning, deadly. Dr Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak who funneled US Government funds to Wuhan have also been less than honest. Don’t expect the Weird Health Organization to find the truth—a senior WHO official laments that they cannot force China to share data. In a country where even the time of the day is a state secret, and whistleblowing is synonymous with suicide, the truth hides in Virus Pong’s devious mind.
There are frightening reports of Chinse virologists testing enhanced potency pathogens on mice that they have “humanized”. Perhaps the Chinese Communists should first humanize themselves.
Ambassador Dr Deepak Vohra is Special Advisor to Prime Minister, Lesotho, South Sudan and Guinea-Bissau; Special Advisor to Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils, Leh and Kargil.