By Larry Romanoff

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

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) The Wuhan virus is the last thing China’s economy needs …

(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

GODFREE ROBERTS

1. Vioxx killed 500,000 Americans: a toll that could have been reduced by 90% had the FDA issued a timely warning.
2. Pharmaceuticals, correctly and legally prescribed, kill 140,000 Americans each year, yet most people are unaware of their lethality and do not know how to a prevent being killed this way.
3. Coronavirus deaths are few, its victims are elderly, and prevention is simple.
4. Media report American flu deaths this season stand at 8200 so far, and that’s not newsworthy?
5. 142,000 Americans died due to pharmaceutical drug use in 2016, but that’s not news, either
6. But 100 Chinese–mostly born during WWII, malnourished and carrying a heavy disease burden–have died from a novel virus and that’s an epidemic?

This year marks the centenary of Spanish flu, the most deadly pandemic in human history. It is estimated that five hundred million people contracted it – a third of the global population in 1918 – and that between fifty and a hundred million of them died. Asians were thirty times more likely to die than Europeans.

Every year it kills hundreds of thousands of people on every inhabited continent while globally, many tens of millions catch the flu bug every year. All these many millions of infected people inoculate others at home, work, schools, places of worship, in travel and in every imaginable public place, spreading their viruses across the planet.

The strain involved in the last flu pandemic, the swine flu outbreak in 2009, was highly infectious, but milder than previous pandemic strains. Of the 61.7 million people living in the UK in 2009, 457 died from it – similar to the usual annual death toll for flu. The 1957 Asian flu and the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu pandemics were more serious; the death toll in each case was estimated at around a million worldwide.

Flu Kills 646,000 People Worldwide Each Year while globally, tens of millions catch the flu. All these many millions of infected people inoculate others at home, work, schools, places of worship, in travel and in every imaginable public place, spreading their viruses across the planet.

The mortality rate of ‘severe’ flu infections worldwide is about 13%–about the same as for ‘severe Sars infections. The new virus may be considerably lower.

Western media condition us to a Pavlovian fear of China with maps like the above, while howling to get China’s flu declared an international health emergency and global pandemic but, so far, the WHO Declines to Declare China Virus Outbreak a Global Health Emergency. How could it, looking at the farcical map shown above?

China’s Public Health Service is probably the most efficient on earth, which is why Chinese children will live longer, healthier lives than their American contemporaries. But that’s not news, either.

Says Nature: The speed and openness of the scientific response to the coronavirus has been unprecedented. Ten days after it was first reported in people, scientists in China and Australia released the virus’s genetic sequence. Within hours, research labs worldwide were putting all hands on deck to understand the disease. “This is one of the first times we’re getting to see an outbreak of a new virus and have the scientific community sharing their data almost in real time,” says molecular biologist Michael Letko.

David Ho, the HIV/AIDS medical researcher, pointed out that as of late last week, the mortality rate appeared to be around 2.5 percent, which is “about 3-4-fold lower than SARS,” adding, “The deaths are occurring in people who are old or those with prior medical conditions. If we were to put the influenza figures next to this new CoV, the absolute case numbers and mortality rates would be much greater [for the regular flu]. But we are rather complacent with flu even though it is quite deadly to the very young, the elderly, and those with underlying medical problems.

No deaths have been reported outside of China, corroborating the relatively low mortality rate from official data in China. The

New York Times summarizes the latest international infection situation:

Thailand and Hong Kong have each reported eight cases of infection; the United States, Taiwan, Australia and Macau have five each; Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia each have reported four; France has three; Canada and Vietnam have two, and Nepal and Cambodia each have one.

THE DARK SIDE

• Since the 20th century, the West has been and continues to be the most avid users of bioweapons. The United States is the biggest user of biochemical weapons in history, including in Cuba; Iraq, Syria and Iran (by proxy); Serbia, Japan, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and America has eagerly used them on its own people, apparently more often than we care to admit.
• In the 1940s the United States purposely infected thousands of Guatemala, natives with syphilis and gonorrhea, to test these human guinea pigs with antibiotics. Of course, these suffering souls were sexually active for the rest of their lives and unwittingly infected everybody they came in contact with, including spouses.
• At Tuskegee, hundreds of American blacks were allowed to carry syphilis from the 1930s to the 1970s, to act as human petri dishes. This was to track the progress of the disease and observe the eventual macabre deaths that this bacteria is wont to inflict on its victims, in its final stages: insanity, nervous disorders, liver and heart disease.
• The United States has a long, illustrious history of using bioterrorism around the world. Cuba has been a favorite target and has seen hundreds of thousands of its people infected with Dengue fever as well as its entire swine herd wiped out by swine fever.
• T he United States of America holds the exclusive patent on the Ebola virus: US patent number 20120251502, is owned by the American government. Ebola has been Uncle Sam’s bioweapon plaything since 1976, when it was discovered in Zaire and shipped 3,500km by America’s bio-warfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, then to West Africa for cultivation and development (via the UK’s bio-warfare labs in Porton Down and with the help of the World “Health” Organization), specifically, to Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the current epicenters of the Ebola epidemic on the Great Continent.
• The 2014 Ebola outbreak came as a result of another rogue US Military operation in austral Africa from which the Soros/Gates-funded Kenema bioweapons lab in Sierra Leone was involved.
• The US has a long history of biowarfare against China. The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China (ISC report) validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of months in 1952. This 667 page truth commission report has the dubious distinction of being the most vilified written document of the 20th Century. The report’s release in September 1952 brought a withering international attack. It was roundly denounced by American and British politicians of the highest rank, ridiculed by four star generals, accused of fraud by celebrated pundits, misquoted by notable scientists, and scorned by a compliant Western press. In subsequent decades, volumes placed in American university library collections were quietly and permanently removed from circulation. When the rare copy came up for auction, it was discretely purchased and disappeared from public view.
• In March 2019, in a mysterious event, a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML biological labs ended up in China. Canadian officials say the shipment was part of its efforts to support public-health research worldwide. They claimed that it was just normal procedure. What is unclear is why it was done in secret, and why the Chinese officials lodged a complaint. For certain, if this was just a routine transfer, the Chinese government would have been notified. In July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc.
• On October 18th, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum assembled “15 leaders of business, government, and public health” to simulate a scenario in which a coronavirus pandemic was ravaging the planet. Major participants were American military leadership, and certain neocon political figures. The Chinese were not invited. The members took notes, and then returned to their day to day operations.
• In Simulation Run 3 Months Ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Predicted Up To 65 Million Deaths Via Coronavirus.
• 300 US military personnel arrived in Wuhan for the Military World Games on October 19. The first coronavirus case appeared two weeks later, on November 2. Coronavirus incubation period is 14 days.
• Two months later a very similar coronavirus pandemic hit China at Wuhan, a major transport hub in Central China and for the high-speed train network, and with 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 right at the Spring Festival travel rush when hundreds of millions of people travel across the country to be with their families.
• The Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is an entirely new strain related to the MERS (MERS-CoV) and the SARS (SARS-CoV) viruses, though early evidence suggested that it was not 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 coronavirus in 2019.
• SARS had 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 . . .” 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.” 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.”
• 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 noted that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been occurring in both medical and military labs for decades. 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.”
• The virus outbreak coincides with the trade war on China.
• The virus outbreak coincides with the HK “pro democracy” riots fully funded and instigated by the NED / CIA.
• The virus outbreak occurred just after Swine Flu decimated the Chinese pork industry.
• The virus outbreak occurred just after Bird Flu decimated the Chinese chicken industry.
• The virus outbreak occurred just before NED support and training of Uyghur Muslim extremists.
• This month, CNN published a gleeful (and untrue) report, “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.”