New Delhi: Is the novel coronavirus a biological weapon? Did it originate in China and escaped from a Wuhan laboratory or is it an American one inflicted on Wuhan? As there is much uncertainty regarding the transmissibility and virulence of this severe socio-political crisis, a spate of conspiracy theories is undermining the efforts to contain the pandemic.
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, directing the Global Health Governance Roundtable, has written an exhaustive article titled, 'US -Chinese Distrust Is Inviting Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories And Undermining Efforts to Contain the Epidemic', published in Foreign Affairs.
In Huangs article, it is emphasised that rumours thrive on fear and uncertainty, and the outbreak of COVID-19, as the disease has been named, offers plenty of both. It was observed that as soon as the pathogen surfaced, social media was abuzz with suggestions that the virus was a biological weaponeither a Chinese one that had escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan or an American one inflicted on Wuhan. While such rumours are not credible, given that neither the United States nor China has incentive to develop biological weapons, they are difficult to dispel, because military officials on both sides still view with suspicion each others motives in building biosecurity programs, wrote Huang.
And the lack of trust between the two nationsas evidenced by Chinas initial refusal to allow US disease experts to visit Wuhanis undermining efforts to contain the viruss global spread, said the author in the article.
The India connection
Huang has pointed out in the article that there is also an unpublished paper authored by Indian scientists that suggested the viruss protein sequence included elements of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The authors withdrew the paper but the proposed linkage caught the attention of websites such as Zero Hedge, and they claimed that the novel coronavirus was weaponized by Chinese scientists. Speaking on Fox News, Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, suggested that it could not be ruled out that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan that is used to handle the most dangerous pathogens, said the article.
In China, social media is full of conjecture that the virus was engineered by the United States as an agent of biological warfare. One widely shared conspiracy theory suggests that American soldiers participating in the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan deliberately shed the virus at the Hunan Seafood Market, wrote the author. A retired People's Liberation Army general called for building a permanent biodefence force in China.
This trouble of rumours is not new in China. The author recalled that during the 2002-3 SARS epidemic, a Russian scientist claimed that the virus was a mixture of measles and mumps that could be made only in the lab. Many Chinese seized on this notion and speculated that SARS was a genetic weapon developed by the United States to target them alone.
The article in Foreign Affairs said the official China Youth Daily linked a National Institutes of Health-sponsored genetic study in China to the US genetic warfare programme. In the United States, meanwhile, a China expert suggested that the virus was linked to Chinas biowarfare program. Yet SARS was by no means a genetic weapon. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of the 166 reported SARS patients in the United States in 2003, 58 percent were white and 32 percent were Asian, said the article by Huang.
Bio battle
The author read chapters from history to figure out how likely is either the United States or China developing deadly biological weapons for use.
It has been published in the article in Foreign Affairs that during World War II, the United States developed biological weapons but never used them. Biological agents had certain liabilities for battlefield use: they didnt take effect right away, they could infect ones own forces, they were sensitive to environmental and meteorological conditions, and they could conceivably contaminate an area for longer than intended. Nonetheless, the United States continued to stockpile and develop biological weapons into the post-war era.
In 1969, the United States got rid of its offensive biological warfare programme and played a crucial role in successfully negotiating an international treaty known as the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The treaty prohibits the development, production, and stockpiling of biological agents and related delivery systems intended for hostile use. In explaining the US decision, President Richard Nixon commented in 1970 that 'well never use the damn germs, so what good is biological warfare as a deterrent? If somebody uses germs on us, well nuke em', wrote the author.
He added that compared with the United States, China came late to the game. China had been on the receiving end of germ warfare, on the part of the Imperial Japanese Armys bio-warfare Unit 731 during World War II, and proceeded to write, As a result, China felt an imperative to build research facilities devoted to defensive biological warfare. In August 1951, Premier Zhou Enlai set up the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) to conduct research on biodefense against 'wartime special weapons'.
Since China did not possess nuclear weapons until the mid-1960s, it may indeed have explored developing biological weapons as a weapon of last resort or a strategic deterrent similar to nuclear weapons. But by 1982, China had acquired a largely invulnerable retaliatory nuclear arsenal. Two years later, China acceded to the BWC. The timing indicates that China, like the United States, found nuclear weapons to be the more credible and effective deterrent, said the author.
There was a shift in China towards economic development and funding for biodefence research facilities dwindled. They began developing products for civilian rather than military purposes. The Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) became something of an analog to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and developed a pan-anti-malaria drug called compound benflumentol and registered patents in more than 50 countries. During the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak, AMMS collaborated with Chinese pharmaceutical companies to develop two drugs [20] for treating the deadly disease, said the author, giving a challenge to conspiracy theories.
Mutual mistrust
China and the United States are both parties to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), yet they look upon each other with suspicion. Many people in China also perceive the United States as a potential biological warfare threat. Going by the past US government reports, allegations have been made that China continued to possess an offensive biological warfare capability based on technology developed prior to its accession to the BWC.
There have been various accusations, which the author said have not been substantiated by open-source evidence. In 2007, Chinese military researchers published an article accusing the United States of using new technologies to develop novel biological weapons agents and claiming that it was extremely likely that anthrax spores in the 2001 attacks on Democratic senators offices came from US military labs. Such suspicions might explain why the Chinese government later tightened regulations on foreigners using human genetic material and made it more difficult to pass the material abroad, wrote Huang.
Mutual distrust has been the legacy of big powers. During World War II, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom all developed biological weapons because they thought Hitlers Germany would develop them (it didnt), said the author.
In the context of frigid bilateral relations, a naturally occurring disease outbreak caused by an unknown pathogen can be easily framed as a bioweapons attack, said the author and quoted the historian Alfred Crosby who noted that the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was suspected to have been started by German agents. His article mentioned that in 2004, the Indian government accused promiscuous Pakistanis of conducting Islamic jihad terrorism by deliberately spreading HIV in Kashmir. When H5N1 (bird flu) became a major concern worldwide in 2008, Indonesias then-health minister, Siti Supari, accused the United States of using virus samples to develop biological weapons and suspended the operation of a US navy medical research unit in Jakarta
Global cost
At a time of deteriorating relations between the United States and China, misperceptions of a hostile origin of COVID-19 have undermined global efforts to tackle the pathogens spread. That is a big concern.
The author pointed out that For weeks, China ignored offers of help from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He has quoted a blog post published on a website affiliated with Jiefang Daily (the official newspaper of the Shanghai Committee of the Communist Party of China). Some US CDC experts might be on a military mission to spy on Chinas virologic research capacity, it says. Interestingly, the author pointed out that two US experts finally joined the World Health Organizations delegation to China in February, but the delegations field visit did not include the Wuhan Institute of Virologyindeed, Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, was initially not even on the groups itinerary.
The author has discredited the conspiracy theories saying in the article that the claim that the novel coronavirus is a biological weapon is not only harmful but also scientifically unsupported. Scientists have pointed out that mutations [31] in the virus are completely consistent with natural evolution. According to The Lancet [32], scientists from multiple countries have overwhelmingly concluded that the novel coronavirus originated in wildlife, he wrote.
The author said that the conspiracy theories have poisoned the atmosphere for US- Chinese collaboration in addressing the outbreak, which might otherwise have presented an opportunity to reset the soured relationship.
In order to dispel misperceptions and minimalize the damage to future relations, the two countries should consider expanding their military-to-military exchanges, such that they might visit each others sites for conducting government-sponsored biodefense work. And the United States should explore channels for helping China improve its laboratory biosafety. The beginning of either measure is dialogue, Huang signed off in the article published on March 5.
Get the best of News18 delivered to your inbox - subscribe to News18 Daybreak. Follow News18.com on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok and on YouTube, and stay in the know with what's happening in the world around you in real time.
Original post:
Exasperating Farrago of Distortions! Coronavirus and the Pandemic of Conspiracy Theories - News18
- Germ Warfare: Learning About Germs - January 21st, 2017 [January 21st, 2017]
- Germ warfare - mutant bugs could wipe out human life - January 24th, 2017 [January 24th, 2017]
- Germ warfare: the battle for the key to modern vaccines - The Guardian - February 7th, 2017 [February 7th, 2017]
- Deadly global pandemic to kill tens of millions: Bill Gates - Press TV - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]
- Biopreparat - Wikipedia - February 18th, 2017 [February 18th, 2017]
- 'Ideation' is complex, convoluted, not-so-funny satire - Marinscope Community Newspapers - February 24th, 2017 [February 24th, 2017]
- The Vaccine Race: How Scientists Used Human Cells to Combat Killer Viruses by Meredith Wadman review - The Guardian - February 27th, 2017 [February 27th, 2017]
- We're 'in touch' every day with things that can make us sick - Williamsport Sun-Gazette - February 28th, 2017 [February 28th, 2017]
- Getting ready for a global pandemic - Amandala - March 1st, 2017 [March 1st, 2017]
- Killen Church Youth Taking Out Germs - courierjournal - March 1st, 2017 [March 1st, 2017]
- Ed Vasicek: The ever-surfacing future has arrived - Kokomo Tribune - March 2nd, 2017 [March 2nd, 2017]
- A human pinball in a germ warfare experiment - Varsity Online - March 7th, 2017 [March 7th, 2017]
- US Navy Film Reveals Crazy Cold War Chemical Weapons Plans - The National Interest Online (blog) - March 12th, 2017 [March 12th, 2017]
- Amherst College announces the Mammoths as first official mascot ... - Boston.com - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- Letter: Protect the public health officials who protect us - Republican Eagle - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- Geoffrey Norman: What Next? After The Syrian Strike - Caledonian Record - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- Could The Global Community Coexist With A Nuclear Pyongyang ... - Daily Caller - April 8th, 2017 [April 8th, 2017]
- Nuclear war: the US took a highly bureaucratic response to preparing for it - The Australian Financial Review - June 9th, 2017 [June 9th, 2017]
- Shoemaker: Seeing a tragedy or a mere statistic? - Opinion ... - MetroWest Daily News - June 11th, 2017 [June 11th, 2017]
- LETTER: Process of forgetting simply facilitated - The Guardian - June 14th, 2017 [June 14th, 2017]
- 'New' way to look at smallpox - Fiji Times - June 16th, 2017 [June 16th, 2017]
- I meant every word - Fort Madison Daily Democrat - June 16th, 2017 [June 16th, 2017]
- What Do We Celebrate? - The Runner - June 17th, 2017 [June 17th, 2017]
- We'll pass on the Liberal Lollapalooza - Net Newsledger - June 18th, 2017 [June 18th, 2017]
- Whom Are You Fooling? - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com - June 23rd, 2017 [June 23rd, 2017]
- The case for keeping 'Langevin Block' - Macleans.ca - June 30th, 2017 [June 30th, 2017]
- Military Tested Germ Warfare on San Francisco and Other ... - June 30th, 2017 [June 30th, 2017]
- Area man wants Amherst to change town's name - The Recorder - August 25th, 2017 [August 25th, 2017]
- EARLE LOCKERBY: A simplistic approach - The Guardian - August 25th, 2017 [August 25th, 2017]
- Belchertown man wants Amherst's town name banished - Amherst Bulletin - August 25th, 2017 [August 25th, 2017]
- Shir Ishii - Wikipedia - February 27th, 2018 [February 27th, 2018]
- U.S. Germ Warfare Experiments used against the American ... - March 10th, 2018 [March 10th, 2018]
- The Long Read: The Germ Warfare Island Abandoned by the ... - May 12th, 2018 [May 12th, 2018]
- Conspiracy Theory? US Army Has Admitted to Conducting 100s ... - May 30th, 2018 [May 30th, 2018]
- US Army Has Admitted To Conducting 100s Of Germ Warfare ... - May 30th, 2018 [May 30th, 2018]
- GERM WARFARE - Carpet Cleaning and Upholstery Cleaning - July 10th, 2018 [July 10th, 2018]
- Coconut Oil: Germ Warfare! | Underground Wellness - July 15th, 2018 [July 15th, 2018]
- Germ Warfare | Recess Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia - July 16th, 2018 [July 16th, 2018]
- History of cancer chemotherapy - Wikipedia - October 16th, 2018 [October 16th, 2018]
- International Military Tribunal for the Far East - Wikipedia - October 16th, 2018 [October 16th, 2018]
- Recess Season 4 Episode 38 | Germ Warfare | Recess Full Episodes TV Series - November 30th, 2018 [November 30th, 2018]
- U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits - The New ... - December 4th, 2018 [December 4th, 2018]
- Germ Warfare | Dexter's Laboratory Wiki | FANDOM powered ... - December 4th, 2018 [December 4th, 2018]
- Colonial Germ Warfare : The Colonial Williamsburg Official ... - December 30th, 2018 [December 30th, 2018]
- America's Secret War: Germs & Biological Weapons - Spies, Scientists (2001) - December 30th, 2018 [December 30th, 2018]
- UNIT 731 Japan's Biological Warfare Project - March 29th, 2019 [March 29th, 2019]
- Korean War - Air warfare | Britannica.com - March 29th, 2019 [March 29th, 2019]
- "M*A*S*H" Germ Warfare (TV Episode 1972) - IMDb - April 14th, 2019 [April 14th, 2019]
- Unit 731 - Wikipedia - April 29th, 2019 [April 29th, 2019]
- The Concern for the Secretive Bio-Geopolitics - FXStreet - October 16th, 2019 [October 16th, 2019]
- Depression Quest: Bad Brains, Good Friends and Night in the Woods - HeadStuff.org - November 25th, 2019 [November 25th, 2019]
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service: This Never Happened to the Other Fellow - Ricochet.com - November 25th, 2019 [November 25th, 2019]
- The Fall or Dive of Sydney Gottlieb and Company - CounterPunch - January 9th, 2020 [January 9th, 2020]
- As China death toll rises, do we need a vaccine for the virus of State secrecy - The Conservative Woman - January 30th, 2020 [January 30th, 2020]
- DC Hero's Most Disgusting Power Was Popular With The President - Screen Rant - January 30th, 2020 [January 30th, 2020]
- Lord Jeffery Amherst, the town namesake who attempted a Native American genocide - Buffalo News - January 30th, 2020 [January 30th, 2020]
- Clean Buildings Expo To Offer Expanded Education Sessions - CleanLink - February 12th, 2020 [February 12th, 2020]
- What If Donald Got the Bug? - LA Progressive - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- Letter to the editor: Don't get your coronavirus information from Rush - The Winchester Star - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- Herbs That Fight Viruses - Newsmax - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- Don't Touch Anything: The Unintended Consequences of Environmental Ecosystems - The Good Men Project - March 4th, 2020 [March 4th, 2020]
- COVID-19 and Us OrissaPOST - Wink Report - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- STERAMIST IS MOBILIZED TO AID IN THE CONTROL SARS-CoV-2 IN DAEGU-KYUNGBUK PROVINCE, SOUTH KOREA - Yahoo Finance - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- We clean freaks will stand and scrub together | Sam Venable - Knoxville News Sentinel - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Corbella: Don't spread the virus or fake news - Calgary Sun - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Coronavirus and what we can learn from the 1918 flu's hidden history - Mashable - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Rab McNeil: Stocks wiped out as germ warfare sees panic buyers rolling in the aisles - HeraldScotland - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- Is biological warfare raising its ugly head? - citytoday - March 16th, 2020 [March 16th, 2020]
- REVEALED: Millions of Brits were in SECRET germ war tests between 1940 and 1979 - Politicalite - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- Coronavirus: How Orania has been affected by the disease - The South African - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- The Plague and the Long War - Inkstick - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- Historically Speaking: The flu epidemic we've been here before - Roswell Daily Record - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- For China and Russia, coronavirus hoaxes are another strain of disinformation warfare - The Globe and Mail - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- State Department marks bioweapons accord with reference to pandemic - Washington Times - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- Past Pandemics Exposed Chinas Weaknesses - Foreign Affairs Magazine - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- 'All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented': Author Max Brooks On COVID-19 - NPR - March 31st, 2020 [March 31st, 2020]
- U.S. Created Coronavirus to Target Islamic Nations! (And Other Conspiracy Theories) | News and Politics - PJ Media - April 9th, 2020 [April 9th, 2020]
- The decade of transformation: Remaking international relations - NationofChange - April 9th, 2020 [April 9th, 2020]
- Mad Man Modly: The Secretary of the Navy Gets the Boot - Antiwar.com - April 9th, 2020 [April 9th, 2020]
- Plagues and wars alter economic policies: but not for ever - The Guardian - April 9th, 2020 [April 9th, 2020]