By Dmitry Orlov
February 15, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
I prefer to write on things
I know about, but once in a while an opportunity
presents itself for me to comment on some aspect of
widespread mistrust and confusion while resting on a
solid foundation of my professional curiosity. This
is the case of the 2019-nCoV novel coronavirus. A
lot of the elements of the coronavirus story just
don’t add up, and that’s what I want to explore. At
the outset, I want to make it clear that I am no
expert on these matters. Is 2019-nCoV a genetically
engineered biological weapon or is it a naturally
evolved strain of a virus that is endemic in China’s
bat population? This we don’t know, but it is
interesting to look at the plausibility of each of
these scenarios and also to consider whether what we
are observing could be a combination of a little of
each.
As a biological weapon of mass destruction,
2019-nCoV isn’t particularly good. On the plus side,
it is highly contagious and can be spread by
infected individuals who are not showing any of the
symptoms, such as fever and shortness of breath. On
the minus side, the mortality rate is a mere 2.1%
and is likely to trend down because this rate does
not account for a potentially huge number of young,
healthy people who contracted the virus but never
developed any symptoms, were never tested for it,
and will never know that they had survived it. For a
virus to be potent as a bioweapon, its kill ratio
needs to be optimized for killing the largest
possible number of its victims, but doing so slowly
enough so that the victims don’t die before they
have a chance to spread the infection.
Another minus: the average age of those who succumb
to it is around 65, making it rather ineffective in
impairing the productive capacities of a nation, be
they industrial or military, since many of those who
die are past their peak productive years or retired.
In fact, taking a rather cynical view, this virus
could be rather helpful in reducing the burden of
economically unproductive sick an elderly people
who, in an aging Chinese population, and given the
respect Chinese society traditionally gives to its
elders, consume a growing share of the country’s
resources.
|
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
On the plus side, those who succumb
to it are predominantly Chinese, male and elderly,
and this may be taken as an indication of some very
clever targeting. In fact, the selectivity of this
virus may be indicative of an effort to selectively
take out members of the Chinese Communist party, in
order to destabilize China politically, to effect
regime change there and to impose US-style
Freedom&Democracy® upon the hapless Chinese
population. Given that the US no longer has the
military might to take on China (and can’t even
respond to Iranian rocket attacks on its military
bases), and given that the US has pretty much lost
the trade war against China, a biological weapon may
be the only arrow left in its quiver.
Let’s keep in mind that the Pentagon has built quite
a number of facilities around the world that
research various pathogens. Given that this is the
Pentagon, whose basic task involves killing people,
not the World Health Organization, it seems likely
that they also do something along the lines of
developing effective biological weapons. A couple of
years ago US operatives were caught collecting DNA
samples from the Russian population and were
promptly escorted out of the country.
The obvious supposition is that these samples were
to be used to develop biological weapons to
specifically target the Russian population. I
suspect that the specialists charged with this task
were most disappointed to discover that the vast
majority of the Russian population consists of just
your regular white people, pretty much the same the
world over, and to target them is to target
themselves. But that is not the case with the
Chinese, whose genetic makeup is more distinctive.
This is all clearly inconclusive, and it may very
well be the case that the Pentagon’s biological
weapons program is just another part of its giant
money-burning machine, or the case may be that it
actually does produce a biological weapon now and
again, and that 2019-nCoV is the meager result it
has so far managed to produce.
But then again, the way the epidemic started is not
what you’d expect if an artificial strain were
released at some place and time. In that case, you’d
expect an instantaneous spike in infections, with
symptoms showing up in a tight cluster right at the
end of the incubation period. But instead what we
saw was sporadic incidents of infection connected
with a certain fish market in Wuhan gradually giving
rise to an epidemic. This suggests that the source
of the virus is a natural one, such as the bats
which were sold at this market. However, the Chinese
have been eating bats for thousands of years (bat
soup is a delicacy), so why would this virus only
emerge now?
The reason for the timing may simply be increased
contact. The virus emerged right around the Chinese
new year. According to the Chinese calendar, this is
the year of the rat, and while the Chinese also eat
rats, bats are preferred. Also, around two-thirds of
all the pigs in China have recently been lost to
swine flu, driving up prices of pork and also,
incidentally, forcing China to start importing pigs
from the US, which were previously subject to an
embargo. This made the naturally abundant bats an
attractive alternative to other sources of animal
protein. Equally serendipitously, China’s chicken
population is now being ravaged by avian flu, and
this, as you might expect, will force China to start
importing chickens from the US as well.
Of course, this is all highly inconclusive, but a
view may be taken that all is fair in love and
war—and trade war with the US especially. But what
has set off a few alarms in my head was the reaction
to the coronavirus epidemic, both in China and in
the West, the US especially.
First, the Chinese government has treated the
epidemic as an act of war, deploying all the means
at its disposal, including the military, in order to
contain its spread, building several large new
hospitals, putting entire huge cities under
quarantine and extending the national holidays. The
response as been far beyond what this virus seems to
warrant, with its low mortality rate. Without saying
so, the Chinese government has treated this epidemic
as an act of biological warfare—perhaps as a dry run
for a more lethal epidemic that may come in the
future. At any rate, the Chinese government is
seeing to it that nobody can blame it for not taking
the problem sufficiently seriously, or not doing
enough about it.
Second, the Western media response has been an
exemplary effort to produce a panic and to smear
China, making what is happening there into a horror
story. Not only did the mass media outlets do their
best to stoke mass hysteria about all things
Chinese, but various bloggers and independent
“experts” pitched in to produce a panic. There seems
to have been a policy-driven reorientation from
Russophibia (where it has been high time for the US
to silently admit defeat and move on) to Sinophobia
(where the US is yet to have its ass handed to it on
a plate). Those notionally independent commentators
who are exploiting this opportunity to attack China
are acting as useful idiots in this centrally
choreographed media campaign.
Third, the White House has recently requested that
experts look into the possibility that 2019-nCoV has
been genetically engineered. It is often the case
that the person who shouts “Catch the thief!” the
loudest happens to be the thief himself. I suspect
that the next move will be to declare that this
virus is indeed an engineered biological weapon
developed by… why, Russia, of course, and Mr. Putin
personally.
Taking all of this into account, the scenario that
seems most plausible to me was that this virus was
genetically engineered in one of the Pentagon’s
biological weapons laboratories and introduced into
China via infected wild bats, having picked the
technology and manufacturing mecca of Wuhan as a
target. The ultimate goal, one might surmise, is to
induce US corporations to repatriate production to
the US mainland in order to “make America great
again.”
But my suspicion is that this isn’t going to work.
The Chinese government will succeed in stopping the
epidemic, in the process demonstrating that it cares
about its people and is effective in protecting
them. Already the infection rate, plotted on a log
scale, is starting to slope down from a straight
line, meaning that the epidemic is losing steam. And
then, working alongside many other countries, China
will move on with the main task of eradicating the
other parasite—which is the United States, a country
that get something for nothing simply by printing
dollars.
Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American engineer and a
writer on subjects related to "potential economic,
ecological and political decline and collapse in the
United States," something he has called “permanent
crisis”. Orlov believes collapse will be the result
of huge military budgets, government deficits, an
unresponsive political system and declining oil
production.
https://cluborlov.blogspot.com
Do you agree or disagree? Post
your comment here
Copyright © Dmitry Orlov
==See Also==
Wuhan lockdown strikes at
heart of 'Made in China 2025'
