Daily Archives: March 26, 2020

Is America about to experience another radical change as in 9-11?

I speak of changes like the chipping away of personal liberties in travel, and the imposition of changes to disrupt the flow of public goods and services, and changes to our liberty habits in shopping, dining out, business practice, social gatherings, entertainment and other liberties we Americans expect.

I remind the Sampson Independent reader that Kim Jong-un, the Supreme Leader of North Korea, said in December 2019 that America was going to receive a Christmas present. Sure enough, in January 2020 the COVID-19 virus became known for the first time in America.

We also know this. The current Central Peoples Government of China, a Communistic regime and ultimate power of the state and North Korea are in bed together. They have been bosom partners as far back as the Korean War, 1950-1953. So, is there a correlation in COVID-19 and Americas Christmas present? Is germ warfare being carried out against the United States? You decide.

As a 36-year federal employee with the Department of Defense, and having served an additional 10-year stint for (DoD) as a consultant, I am aware of what germ warfare is.

Now, totality disconnected from the government and not knowing the current protocol for Situation Awareness (SA), Im no longer the expert I once was. (By the way, SA is the conscious perception of environmental events and other strange occurrences respecting time and space. It is used as a tool to serve management in a broad range of decision-making processes, including war.)

But I do know that President Trump was debriefed by then President Obama in November/December 2016 respecting the pressure points and other troublesome hot spots facing America. And I do know the new President was told by Obama that Kim Jong-un was intractable, and that war with him could erupt anytime, without notice.

So, having given my reader the immediate DoD backstory on Red China, and the tactics of North Korea, and the insidious germ called COVID-19; and too, knowing that Iran looks upon America as the devil, and possibly the third player to an axis of evil, what must a reasonable person conclude that these days are but the beginning of sorrows and sufferings?

Im just an ole country boy at heart that quit school in the third grade because I caught-up with my daddy and his class. It embarrassed me to be in the same homeroom with him, so I quit.

But one thing I know: I was born at night, but not last night.

Jack Dawsey can be reached at [emailprotected]

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COVID-19: Germ warfare targeting the US? - Sampson Independent

A reporter wearing a latex glove raises his hand to ask President Trump a question during a coronavirus briefing at the White House on March 16. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

A reporter wearing a latex glove raises his hand to ask President Trump a question during a coronavirus briefing at the White House on March 16.

Apocalyptic novelist Max Brooks is something of an expert on planning for pandemics and other disasters. The author, whose books include World War Z, Germ Warfare and the forthcoming Devolution, has toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and has reviewed government response plans related to various emergency situations all in the course of research.

"We have a network in place that we as taxpayers have been funding to get us ready for something just like this," Brooks says of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But, he adds, "we have been disastrously slow and disorganized from Day 1."

Brooks says the notion that the U.S. government was blindsided by the pandemic is "an onion of layered lies."

"What could have happened when this virus exploded even when Wuhan was locked down is we could have put the word out," he says. "The government could have put the word out to ramp up emergency supplies to get them ready and then have an information strategy in place."

Instead, Brooks says, President Trump was slow to acknowledge the virus as a real threat. And thus far, the president has resisted using the Defense Production Act to force private companies to manufacture masks, gloves and other essential supplies in the fight against the coronavirus. Many government task forces that plan for disasters have yet to be activated in this crisis.

"One of the biggest problems we're facing now is panic. You see it in the stock market. You see it in panic buying," he says. "All of this panic could have been prevented. ... If the president had been working since January to get the organs of government ready for this, we as citizens could have been calmed down knowing that the people that we trust to protect us are doing that."

On the task forces that plan for situations like this

Max Brooks has researched disaster preparedness for his novels and has lectured on the subject at the U.S. Naval War College. He has also been a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His new book, Devolution, will be published May 2020. Michelle Kholos/Penguin Random House hide caption

Max Brooks has researched disaster preparedness for his novels and has lectured on the subject at the U.S. Naval War College. He has also been a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His new book, Devolution, will be published May 2020.

I can tell you that the federal government has multiple layers of disaster preparedness who are always training, always planning, always preparing, regardless of how much their budget gets cut. I have toured the CDC, and I've seen all their plans. I have witnessed what was called a "vibrant response." This is the homeland nuclear attack scenario, which was a coordination of FEMA, the Army, the National Guard, state and local officials, all working together in a massive war game to prepare us for a nuke. I have also witnessed what was called a "hurricane rehearsal of concept drill," where not only did the same players come in, but also bringing in our allies from Canada and Mexico. So I have seen that we have countless dedicated professionals who think about this constantly and they're ready to go. And they have not been activated.

On why these task forces haven't been activated yet

There is no excuse not to mobilize the full forces of the federal government right now and to centralize the response.

Max Brooks

This all has to come from the federal government. This is why we have big government. Politically, you can argue about the role of big government in everyday society, but this is not every day. This is an emergency. The entire reason that we have these networks is when the bells start ringing and they have not been activated. I don't know. I'm not sitting in the White House. I don't know whether the president is being lied to, whether he is holding onto a political ideology. I honestly don't know. But there is no excuse not to mobilize the full forces of the federal government right now and to centralize the response.

On how the Defense Production Act works when mobilized properly

What is supposed to happen is the federal government has to activate the Defense Production Act immediately. Now, what Defense Production Act does is it allows the federal government to step in and aggressively force the private sector to produce what we need. And what is so critical in this is timing. Because you can't simply build factories from scratch; what you can do is identify a supply chain in order to make it work.

For example, if New York needs rubber gloves, New York cannot simply build rubber glove factories overnight. However, there might be a rubber glove factory in Ohio that could produce it, but they might not have the latex. So therefore, the Defense Production Act allows the federal government to go to the condom factory in Missouri and say, "Listen, you have barrels of latex we need. We are requisitioning those. We are giving them to the rubber glove factory in Ohio. And then we are transporting the finished rubber gloves to New York." That's how it is supposed to work.

On how Trump warns about nationalizing private industry but that's not how it works

President Trump is spinning some sort of tale about, I don't know, the federal government black helicopters coming in and taking over factories. That's not how it works at all. What happens is the federal government has the network to identify where the production chain is and how to help the private sector work through this, because the private sector doesn't know.

And as an example, I have a World War II rifle made by the Smith Corona typewriter company. Smith Corona worked with the federal government to then partner up with the Winchester company, to then share resources and to share tools and talent to then produce the rifles that we needed. That's how it works. It's not some sort of KGB coming in and taking over everything. It is guidance and streamlining. And only the federal government has the experience to know how to do that.

On what the U.S. military would do in a pandemic

I can tell you that the military has a vast transportation network here in the United States that is ready to go. We don't have to put truck drivers or private individuals at risk, because the military is already trained to do this. And I've watched them do this. The military spent years working out the legal framework of how to transport goods from one place to another around this country, because it's not like Afghanistan, where the army builds a road and then they own the road. The army has had to go through a tremendous amount of training and adaptation to work within state and local governments to make sure everything is done legally and safe without infringing on our rights. And they have done this. The Army's logistics corps can deliver anything that we need anywhere in this country within a matter of hours or days.

When it comes to sheer massive might, getting stuff done, getting stuff produced and getting stuff moved from Point A to Point B, there is no greater organ in the world than the United States military. We did it in World War II. We've done it all over the world. We can do this now. This is the thing the military is good at, and we need to let them do that.

On how the pandemic is revealing flaws in our social structure

I think there are massive gaps in our systems that are being exposed right now, which, by the way, this is not news to the experts. Anybody who works in these fields could have told you years ago that we were vulnerable to this. It's going to rip through our prisons. It's going to rip through our homeless population. God willing, it doesn't rip through our nursing homes. But what no one is talking about, what terrifies me, what keeps me up at night are the secondary casualties that will occur because of hospital overflow. What I mean is we're only talking about now how many people are going to die if the coronavirus really rips through our country. What is not being talked about enough or what needs to be talked about are the people who are still going to die of cancer, of accidents, of other diseases, because they simply can't get into the hospitals because the hospitals are choked with coronavirus patients.

On how we share some of the blame for this mismanagement as voters in a democracy

In China, every single death will be laid directly at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party. They have all the power; therefore, they take all the responsibility. When we look back at this, we all of us individual citizens are going to have to take a measure of personal responsibility, because we are the government. If we don't like our leaders, we shouldn't have put them there. And as much as we would love to blame this historically incompetent captain of our ship of state, we have allowed the ship to rust underneath us. It's not just President Trump's fault that institutions like the CDC have been defunded for years. It's not just President Trump's fault that we have allowed anti-vaxxers to spread misinformation throughout this country. It's not just President Trump's fault that we are continuing to build a society in support of a tech world that is based on comfort and not on resilience. We as voters and we as taxpayers must accept our share of the blame.

When this is all over, when the dead are buried and the sick are healed, there will be a reckoning.

Max Brooks

There is a massive amount of blame that will be laid at the feet of Donald Trump and his enablers. And when this is all over, when the dead are buried and the sick are healed, there will be a reckoning. But there were systemic issues way before Donald Trump. When Donald Trump was a carnival barker on a reality show, we as a people, as a nation, were dismantling the systems that were put in place to keep us safe. And we need to look at that damage, because the one thing we don't want to do is assume that when Donald Trump goes away, that the problems will go with him.

On the difference between panic and preparation

Panic never helps. Panic implies that you lose your mind, and that in a war even a war against a microscopic enemy gives aid and comfort to the enemy. When you panic, you don't think rationally, and in times of crisis, rational thought is the greatest weapon you could possibly have. So preparing, No. 1, means clearing your mind and thinking about what you have to do. It means making a list of what you need to buy, prioritizing what needs to come first, thinking about how you're going to take care of the people around you. That is preparing. Panicking is freaking out and getting in a fistfight in the grocery store over bottled water when you don't even need the water, when the tap is already running. That's panic.

Right now we have to be so careful about who we listen to, because panic can spread much faster than a virus.

Max Brooks

I think right now we have to be so careful about who we listen to, because panic can spread much faster than a virus. And I think in addition to social distancing, we have to practice good fact hygiene. What I mean is we have to be careful what we listen to, what we take in just as if it were a virus. And we have to be careful also what we put back out, as if we were spreading the virus. So we cannot pass along rumors. We cannot pass along misinformation. We must be critically careful not to scare people into doing irrational and dangerous things. So we need to listen to experts, the CDC, Dr. Fauci [director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], the World Health Organization, our local public health officials. These are the front-line soldiers that are doing everything to keep us safe and are literally putting their lives on the line. These are the people we need to listen to. What we cannot listen to is random facts on the Internet supposedly, things that people are passing along to us, conspiracy theories. And I'm very sorry to say this, but I think that everything our president says at this point must be fact-checked.

Lauren Krenzel and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

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'All Of This Panic Could Have Been Prevented': Author Max Brooks On COVID-19 - NPR

Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether.

Such concludes the introduction to the Plague of Athens from Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. The historian, an Athenian general who lived through the events he described, captures the horror of life in an epidemic, and in isolation. The plague arrived with the Spartan invasion, but it mostly hit the civilian populations of the area in and around Athens, and so the plague brought by invaders became an unintentional ally in the fight. Estimates of deaths from the five-year period that the disease ravaged Athens sit between 75,000 to 100,000, or nearly a quarter of the city-states population at the time.

The specific disease that hit Athens during the siege remains a subject of medical debate. What is known is that the disease originated in Ethiopia, and then it spread through the Mediterranean. Its persistence and lethality are unusual features, even among the ancient world, with candidates including both the plague and smallpox.

For an epidemic to become an epidemic it has to remain deadly while traveling with humans, rather than just killing them outright. It takes a particular kind of connected world, and a particular kind of violence in that connection, to make such a disease stick around and fester, a wound in the body politic.

History is rich with the plagues that followed war. The movement of people and armies and the whole long trail of food and supplies that entails can serve as a vector for diseases that, left to their own locality and without interconnection, might simply have become a local tragedy. Disease spreads through the people doing the fighting, and it spreads among the civilians displaced.

It takes a particular kind of connected world, and a particular kind of violence in that connection, to make such a disease stick around and fester, a wound in the body politic.

When in Revelations John describes the biblical apocalypse as preceded by war, famine, pestilence, and death, he is merely casting the realities of armed conflict into, well, biblical proportions.

Germ theory is too modern a phenomenon to have been reliably incorporated into the strategies of ancient besieging forces, but disease has long been an incidental weapon of war. The most historically famous example is the Mongolian siege of the Genoese-settled city of Caffa on the Black Sea.

As the Mongols retreated in the face of an assault by a relieving force, a contemporary account recorded that the Mongols used their siege weapons to hurl diseased corpses over the city walls, spreading black death.

What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea, wrote the Italian notary Gabriele de Mussi, likely based on eyewitness accounts. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the [Mongolian] army.

Mussis account of the end of the Siege of Caffa has long been cited as both an early incidence of deliberate biological warfare and a clue as to the route through which the black death made it to Europe, though both claims are contested. Regardless, the nature of a siege is to combine deprivation with density, and for the besiegers to trust that, on a long enough timeline, the people trapped inside, even if supplied by the sea, will succumb to the pressure.

Sieges, with defenders surrounded by hostile armed forces intending to wait them out, still happen in the modern world, much as they seem a fixture of a past era. These sieges, like those in antiquity, come with the diseases of deprivation, and the diseases that pass through populations thrown into violent conflict.

What is structurally different about sieges in modernity is that humans now have a scientific understanding of disease itself, and at least according to the conventions and treaties signed by nations, a humanitarian obligation to treat it. It was easy to see, in 2017 and 2018, an international condemnation of the siege tactics used by Bashar al Assad in Syria, tactics that brought deliberate suffering on civilian populations as a means of consolidating military rule.

It is somewhat harder, in the face of the international COVID-19 pandemic, to see where siege conditions are enforced to siege-like ends by means other than bullets and bombs.

International sanctions regimes, designed to allow primarily the United States to withhold access to the dollar as an international reserve currency from nations it views as acting against American interests, enable a sort of invisible siege. Enforcing second-order sanctions, whereby companies risk losing access to the US dollar if they also engage in business with the targeted country, serves as a way to effectively sever the targeted country from the vast majority of the international market.

By design, these sanctions inflict suffering primarily on civilians within the targeted country. As a coercive tool, the logic is that deliberately depriving the people in a country will make those same deprived people pressure their leaders. The ultimate end state is that, either from pressure below or to relieve suffering, the leaders of a sanctioned state change behavior more in line with US interest.

In a pandemic, these sanctions exacerbate deprivation into full-on crisis. While humanitarian goods nominally are allowed through sanctions, many banks refuse to process those transactions, afraid that doing so would expose them to penalties under second-order sanctions. The Geneva Conventions explicitly permit safe passage for food and medical supplies to physically besieged populations, but those rules do not apply to economic sanctions. While not formally cut off from aid, a global refusal to sell medical supplies under penalty of second-order sanctions can cause deprivation, much the same as an army camped outside the gates did in antiquity.

As reported by the New York Times on March 21st, Secretary of State Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell have made the case for exactly this ancient military application of disease and siege to the President.

Irans leaders have been harder hit by the coronavirus than almost any other country, and they have been hiding their infection from colleagues, according to intelligence reports heightening distrust and divisions in the government, reports the Times. Trump administration officials who advocate aggressive action have used those reports to press the case for escalating American military action against Iran.

What is happening in Iran is just one example of a multitude of economic sieges across the globe, maintained in the face of a truly international pandemic. To treat this crisis as wholly a public health event without acknowledging the context in which it takes place is to ignore the interrelated histories of war and disease. It is to treat the afflictions, as the ancient Athenians did, as a supernatural occurrence beyond anyones control.

To keep the siege in place is to look at the way it ravages thousands across the globe, and to turn away. It is a cold declaration on the side of cruelty. It is to say, simply, that epidemics are war by other means.

Kelsey D. Atherton is a defense technology journalist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His reporting has appeared in Popular Science, C4ISRNET, and The New York Times.

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The Plague and the Long War - Inkstick

MILLIONS were unwitting Guinea Pigs in biological weapon trials between 1940 and 1979 in which germs were released into the air, according to bombshell reports.

In 2002, amid the SARS outbreak, top-secret documents released revealed that the Ministry of Defence turned large parts of Britain in laboratories during WW2 up to 1979.

The government report revealed for the first time that the British Government conducted trials on its own people releasing toxic chemicals and micro-organisms into the air.

The Guardain reported: Many of these tests involved releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms over vast swaths of the population without the public being told.

While details of some secret trials have emerged in recent years, the 60-page report reveals new information about more than 100 covert experiments.

The report reveals that military personnel were briefed to tell any inquisitive inquirer the trials were part of research projects into weather and air pollution.

The tests, carried out by government scientists at Porton Down, were designed to help the MoD assess Britains vulnerability if the Russians were to have released clouds of deadly germs over the country.

In most cases, the trials did not use biological weapons but alternatives which scientists believed would mimic germ warfare and which the MoD claimed were harmless.

But families in certain areas of the country who have children with birth defects are demanding a public inquiry.

One chapter of the report, The Fluorescent Particle Trials, reveals how between 1955 and 1963 planes flew from north-east England to the tip of Cornwall along the south and west coasts, dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide on the population.

The chemical drifted miles inland, its fluorescence allowing the spread to be monitored. In another trial using zinc cadmium sulphide, a generator was towed along a road near Frome in Somerset where it spewed the chemical for an hour.

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REVEALED: Millions of Brits were in SECRET germ war tests between 1940 and 1979 - Politicalite

TuesdayMar24,2020at4:40PM

March 21 -- To the Editor:

Mr. Azzi, again, please stick to taking pictures. In your most recent column, you speak of Cotton Mather, someone called Onesimus, Harvard and someone cutting something and putting a drop in. Brilliant. After bloviating and introducing a number of useless facts, you make a point by stating all the good things that immigrants do. Here we agree just as long as the immigrants are legal immigrants. Simply put, if you are not here legally you dont belong here. Common sense, no?

Next point. You go on to say that people choose to be racists, xenophobic, conspiracy theorists and a bunch of other stuff. Granted, they exist. But then you go on to call half the nation ignorant because they believe in this president. Im quite surprised that you didnt use the word "deplorable" but then you must have remembered what that word did to Hillary. Thank God. In making that statement you have now become the judge and chief hypocrite. On your golden pedestal preaching down to the masses about how morally and politically insufficient they are. Look in the mirror, Mr Azzi, you speak of yourself.

Now, onto China. Heaven forbid we accuse the Chinese of anything, right? They unleashed a plague onto the world. It came from Wuhan, China so we will, to your great dissatisfaction, call it the Chinese or Wuhan virus. Now, how do you know it didnt come out of a Chinese germ warfare lab. You dont know. I will agree it is far-fetched that George Soros was its owner. How do you know the Chinese did not unleash this virus on purpose? If they did it was flawlessly executed causing great damage to world economies while limiting damage to their own. Of course, you would call this possibility a conspiracy theorists dream. You might see the world through rose colored glasses I see it for what it is and its not pretty. Like it or not, the Chinese are our enemy and they look upon us as being their enemy. We will leave it at that.

Of course, in one of your last paragraphs you wrap it up and bring it to a head. Your Trump Derangement Syndrome shines through here. Your goal achieved. You let it be known, again, how much you disdain this president. Maybe youre trying to reap discord in U.S. society. If not, understand we are going through tough times and give the guy a break. Just think you could have Hillary, Biden or Sanders working on this puzzle. A puzzle they would certainly never solve.

Dan Hurley

Dover

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Letter: Columnist should give the president a break - Foster's Daily Democrat

In the midst of dispersal of COVID-19 in 196 countries in the world, Islamic State (IS) has published key three posts to encourage jihadists around the world to capitalize the pandemic situation to mount attacks against the Kafirs. Such propaganda depicts that extremists should not be taken out of the security equation during the pandemic situation, in fact they can be proactive, innovative and capitalize such volatile condition to achieve their goals.

Recently, a memo has been circulated by a Homeland Security Department to the law enforcement officials across United States of America (USA) warning that violent extremists would capitalize the unstable social phenomena due to COVID-19, to attack the USA. Even if the USA security agencies have emphasized a possible attack by the jihadist only to the USA, current pro IS propaganda has threatened the entire kafirs amidst rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic.

On 2nd March 2020 an IS aligned group shared a post in a pro IS social media platforms highlighting the incapability of kafir states to find a significant scientific solution to COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, on 12th March 2020, a similar post was circulated in a pro IS messaging platform describing the pandemic as a divine punishment to the enemies. It also emphasized harshly affected countries such as China, Iran and Italy are respectively can be categorized as countries with atheists, Shias and crusaders/Christians. As a result, they are severely punished by god. Further, on 19th March 2020 in the editorial of Naba 226, which is a pro-IS magazine, stated that jihadists should capitalize the current pandemic situation to launch attacks against the non-believers. It also emphasized the need of the lone-wolves to mobilize and capitalize the social fear rendering in the crusader countries due to COVID-19.

However, due to the swiftly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, within a short period of time the security concerns have changed from jihadism to bio-defence. Hence, it is important to calculate the expansion and possible transformation of modes operandi in jihad activities in a COVID-19 world.

COVID-19 pandemic has depicted that world can be shut down/locked down in few minutes of time due to a germ which is not even visible to the naked eye of the humans. As of 25th March 2020, one third of the world population is under lockdown and are under strict quarantine regulations imposed by the governments. The latest addition to the lockdown list was India which is also known as the worlds largest democracy. Yet again, the Indian government had to make a choice between democracy and human right over grater good for the greater number of people in a pandemic situation. Additionally, COVID 19 has also emphasized the fact that, from minimum effort, maximum damage can be caused to countries across the planet. According to the latest statistics nearly 446,699 COVID-19 cases are reported and 19,804 deaths have been recorded.

Not only human cost is a major concern of this pandemic, but also the economic loss to the entire international political system needs to be taken into consideration. Affected countries are heavily investing on containing the pandemic and due to the lockdown the business activities have halted. This phenomena depicts a simple germ can cause vital impact to human lifestyle and to the international system which is what the jihadists are searching for. With less amount of effort, jihadists want to gain the maximum impact which has now been depicted by a virus. This hints the idea that instead of using complicated machines and bombs similar impact can be obtained by a simple method. Also, such kind of virus or a germ can be developed under minimum supervision and resources. In fact in 2018, MI5 anticipated that returned British jihadists form the IS territory were trained in developing basic bio-weapons and they have the capacity to make ricin and anthrax.

Not only that, but also COVID-19 highlighted that such kind of virus or a germ can be commuted very easily to the community with minimum notice. Also the haulier will not be caught immediately and therefore, can be transported between borders with less security precautions. Also, a virus like COVID-19 can be easily used by the lone-wolves and the results are deadly and affect a larger community by a simple action. Therefore, COVID-19 provides a manual with innovative ideas to the jihadists on how to gain maximum with minimum effort and resources.

Within such context, it is evident that jihadi groups such as IS has comprehend the importance and the effectiveness of such a pandemic. Since, many countries are now locked down due to the spread of the virus, this explains the catastrophe which can be caused by a germ. As a result, due to its effects from minimal cost of compromise, germ warfare can be used by terrorists to further achieve their goals. Hence, it is important for the countries to expand research and development to understand the nature of bio-weapons and whether there is a possibility of such strategy to be used by violent non-state actors such as ISIS and Al Qaeda.

On the other hand, with the continuation of the release of foreign fighters from the prisons in Syria, Kurdistan and Turkey, it is important to secure the boarders since they can be the haulier of such bio-weapons intentionally or unintentionally. Moreover, intelligence agencies need to work round the clock to identify jihadists with the capacity on developing such kind of bio-weapons to achieve their goals. Also, these intelligence agencies need to be educated in bio-defence and warfare since COVID-19 has depicted the need of the hour for such capacity building.

Finally, in an emergency situation like COVID-19, governments should be cautious in surrogating the security priorities and rapidly substituting jihadism with a soon mushroomed apprehension, since there will be an imbalance in tackling both old and new security concerns. Hence, jihadism will flourish in the shadow of COVID-19 without notice and can take advantage of the situation to gain the jihadi goals.

*Sinduja Umandi Wickramasinghe Jayaratne is an Intelligence Analyst in a leading security related organization and a Visiting Lecturer in Bandaranaike International Diplomatic Training Institute in Sri Lanka.

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Why The World Should Not Forget Threat Of Jihadism Amidst COVID-19 Analysis - Eurasia Review

On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the Peoples Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) must have emerged in the capital of Hubei province that has not been held under sufficient scrutiny by Western corporate media.

The question of whether the COVID-19 coronavirus could have come from the U.S. army was controversially raised by Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liljian Zhao, who tweetedan articlefrom the Center for Research on Globalization website which subsequently went viral. Feigning concern over the spread of disinformation, Western media coverage uniformly avoided sourcing the article Zhao had shared on social media while predictably dismissing the claim as a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, Irans Civil Defense Chief alsosaidthe coronavirus could be a biological attack on China and Iran, as the Islamic Republic has been the third-most impacted nation with more than 12,000 cases including many at the highest levels of its government with multiple senior officials infected. Contrary to such mainstream media scaremongering, it is completely reasonable and should be permitted to speculate about the origins of the virus. That Zhaos posing of the theory received such a hostile response from the U.S. establishment is telling of how delicate their propaganda echo chamber is.

Although the disease is widely assumed to have been first transmitted through zoonosis because the earliest grouping of cases were linked to a Wuhan seafood market trading exotic wildlife in late December, the actual first known case was traced to the beginning of the month and may not have been originally passed through an animal. Many on the political right have even suggested the coronavirus is an effect of Chinese biological warfare which unexpectedly leaked from a lab in Wuhan, a theory disseminated in the pages of propaganda rags likeThe Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the founder of the right-wing Korean Unification Church cult, Sun Myung Moon, as well asThe Epoch Timesof the similarly fascistic religious sect of Chinese expatriates, the CIA-linked Falun Gong. In spite of that, it is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology hasclose tiesto the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas, one of the Pentagons largest biological defense lab programs. Whereas no evidence exists that the Chinese government is responsible for COVID-19, nor does the PRC have a history of engaging in bio-warfare, there is an abundance of proof that the U.S. government has long been involved in the manufacturing and use of biological weapons since the Korean war.

When the accusations were first made by North Korea and China that the U.S. was using biological and germ warfare in the 19501953 Korean War, they were rejected outright by Washington as a hoax and rebuffed by the Western-biased WHO. In the decades since, the U.S. has maintained its denial while scholarly debate on the subject isdivided. However, anunredacted reportfrom 1952 from an investigation sponsored by the World Peace Council and conducted by an International Scientific Commission headed by Sir Joseph Needham, a highly reputable British biochemist of his era, was unearthed in 2018 and presents ample substantiation of the allegations, including eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence and documented confessions by American POWs. More disturbingly, the investigation indicates direct links between the U.S. biological warfare program and the germ warfare program of Unit 731, a clandestine bio and chemical warfare unit of Imperial Japan during World War II. During the Cold War, the Japanese researchers were secretly given immunity and recruited by the U.S. in exchange for their knowledge in human experimentation, along with many former Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip.

Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army collected data not only through performing deadly experiments on humans but environmentally testing plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start disease outbreaks. Many of these tactics were continued by the U.S. in the KoreanWar.According to Stephen Kinzer,journalist and author ofPoisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, the CIAs Project MK-ULTRA which was coordinated with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories was:

Essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

Frank Olson,one of the biowarfare scientists and CIA employees in the program who died under mysterious circumstances in 1953, is the subject of the Netflix docu-drama seriesWormwood,directed by Errol Morris and featuring renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, which reveals Olson may have been a potential government whistleblower on the CIAs activities and U.S. bio-war crimes. It is worth noting that the usage of such agents in the Korean War included Chinese targets, the last and only major armed conflict between the U.S. and China, so if the COVID-19 pandemic were proven to be a product of U.S. biowarfare against Beijing, it would not be the first time.

Officially, the U.S. is said to have abandoned its bioweapons program in 1969, but its installation in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has continued conducting research into deadly pathogens and viruses on the stated purpose of bio-defense, as well as fighting disease outbreaks, developing vaccines, and other public health concerns. Yet just last year, research into fatal viruses and bioweapons were suspendedamid concerns they could be accidentally be released. The last time Fort Detricks germ warfare research was suspended was in 2009 after the Pentagon found discrepancies in the inventory of its infectious agents, the same year as the last pandemic of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak.

Fort Detrick has been under tighter restrictions since the 2001 anthrax attacks were traced to Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the facility. The suspected perpetrator and army biologist committed suicide in 2008 after learning the FBI was going to charge him with terrorism, which if proven to be true would mean that the Pentagons own biodefense research itself had led to rather than protected the American public from bioterrorism though there is plenty of evidence suggesting Ivins was framed by the feds. As journalist Whitney Webb uncovered, the U.S. Armys Medical Research branch headquartered in Maryland hascooperatedwith the Wuhan Institute of Virology mentioned previously for decades.

Toying around with organisms that can produce disease is a regular practice for the Pentagon. In 2005, U.S. scientists announced that they had even successfullyrecreated the avian influenza flu virusin a lab which killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918, widely known as the Spanish flu. The name is actually a misnomer, as it was disproportionately attributed to Spain which was neutral in World War I and was not subject to the same wartime censorship of the press to upkeep morale like in Germany, the UK, France and the U.S. whose media initially underreported the pandemics effects in their respective countries. The geographic source of the Spanish flu is still the subject of much debate, but the first observation of the disease was at a U.S. military installation in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918. Needless to say, the risks involved with resurrecting a disease that wiped out more than a quarter of the worlds population are not trivial, but this did not prevent the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology from extracting the genetic coding of the Spanish flu from the exhumed corpse of a Native Alaskan woman frozen in the ground who died of the disease in an Inuit town in 1918.

There is no direct evidence showing that the 2009 swine flu said to have originated in Mexico through zoonosis from pigs was any leak of the restored Spanish flu, but the previous swine flu outbreak of 1976 began at a U.S. army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, just like the Spanish flu of 1918. After the Gerald R. Ford administration jumped the gun and announced a flu epidemic was pending following the death of a single soldier, a subsequent mass immunization program without proper testing for side effects was administered to a staggering 45 million people, exactly a quarter of the entire U.S. population at the time, which ended up killing more Americans than the disease itself. The scandal forever sowed the seeds of public distrust regarding inoculation after more than 450 people developed Guillain-Barr Syndrome and 25 died from the immunization before it was halted.

If such a mandatory vaccination program were to be implemented again in the U.S. for COVID-19, the government would have to reassure the public its previous negligence of such side effects would not be repeated, an unlikely scenario after the corporate breach of trust exposed on Wall Street in recent years involving large pharmaceutical firms. Regardless, Big Pharma is alreadypartnering with the U.S. army to develop a vaccine for the coronaviruswhich would have to be tested and evaluated before licensing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommended for use by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which partner with the WHO whose largest financial contributor is the U.S. government.

One of the WHOs other largest benefactors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with whom it has a partnership on vaccinations. The billionaire Microsoft Corporation founder has used his enormous wealth to dodge paying taxes under the guise of philanthropy and his charitable private ventures have mostly focused on producing vaccines for developing countries and purportedly tackling global poverty, especially in Africa. On the surface this may appear to be benevolent work, but like many so-called altruistic projects it is a scheme which allows ultra-wealthy plutocrats like Gates to influence global policy and obtain political power with no accountability by investing in fixing the social problems caused by the very system which made them rich, with the expansion of neoliberalism as their real agenda. The consequences of this can be seen with charitable projects involving Gates in the Congowhich forced its local agribusiness into using GMO seeds which only benefited private companies like Monsanto.

More disturbing is that in regards to environmental concerns about man-made climate change, Gates has made public his views on curbing human population growth as a solution. At a 2010 TED Conference, Gatesstated:

First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. Thats headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.

To put it another way, one of the worlds wealthiest men admitted in public he believes vaccines should be used for depopulation, just as he is financially investing in both developing and delivering them to countries in the global south. The misanthropic myth of overpopulation pushed by Gates and the elite not only suggests that depopulation is a solution for slowing the warming of the climate but retains the logic of an essential component of eugenics with the implicit idea that the quality of life for the human species can be improved by discouraging human reproduction. Since developing countries have the highest child mortality rates, families are more likely to be larger because children are less likely to survive. Hence, the inherent racism and classism in such a misconception.

Given that the vast majority of carbon emissions are produced by ashort list of fossil fuel companiesand the worldslargest polluter is the U.S. military, promoting this dangerous fallacy is the perfect way for the ruling elite to shift the responsibility for climate change onto the worlds poor. Unfortunately, this dangerous falsehood has been popularized in the mainstream environmental movement and pseudo-left with examples such asBirthStrike, a group of mostly female activists protesting the lack of regulations on the ecological crisis by refusing to bear children that has been irresponsibly endorsed by popular progressive politicians such as U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). AOC is also the face of the Democratic Partys Green New Deal which has troubling ties to the United Nations Agenda 21 sustainable development program that calls for achieving a more sustainable population.

The false notion of overpopulation became a misguided cornerstone of the modern day environmental movement thanks to the publication of American scientist Paul Ehrlichs best-selling book The Population Bombin 1968,an alarmist diatribe that has in the years since become famous for its inaccurate doomsday predictions as a result of the mistaken belief which never came to fruition. Todays doom merchants regarding the climate, no doubt a serious issue, are in many respects channeling Ehrlichs false prophecies which are considered a modern rehash of the influential 18th century British economist and philosopher, Thomas Malthus. No single scholar was more loathed by Karl Marx and and the working class movement than Malthus, whose pseudo-scientific theories about demography were thought to have been intellectually defeated until they found new life in Ehrlichs eco-fascism. As much as todays population bombers like Bill Gates may shun the more explicitly racist Malthusian ideas that the global north should contain the population of developing countries, they still tacitly endorse them by arguing that the size of the population itself is a source a poverty and climate change.

Bill Gates has cited business tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in American history who had an even greater monopoly on the oil business as Gates had at one time on the computer industry, as an inspiration in using his wealth to invest in medical research as a focus of his philanthropy. However, Gates has something else in common with the Rockefeller family in his views on population, as the Rockefeller Foundation was the single largest donor to the American eugenics movement in the 1920s and 30s and helped establish its German branch, even subsidizing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics that Nazi physician Josef Mengele worked in prior to his wartime experiments. Despite the fact that a line can be traced from the American eugenics movement to the Nazi regimes programs, which Nuremberg defendants even tried to use as justification for their atrocities in court, Rockefellers grandson John Rockefeller III continued the family legacy of interest in demography with the founding of the Population Council NGO which conducts research in reproductive health (sterilization) in developing countries. The Nazi government was also the first to ever pass legislation safeguarding the environment which they equated with German national identity, another unexpected intersection between brown and green politics.

In an astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation hosted an event just last October with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum called Event 201, a pandemic simulation which gathered elite figures in government, business and health expertise to plan for the possibility of a worldwide outbreak. Gates himself has warned of pandemics for years and ominouslywrotethat the world should prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war. The Event 201 fictional scenario just so happened to be a coronavirus called CAPS from Brazilian pigs which infected people globally and after a year and half in the exercise causedtens of millions of deathsand set off a worldwide financial crash. Since the outset of the real COVID-19 coronavirus, Gates himself hasstepped down from Microsoftto focus on his philanthropy while his foundation isbusy working on a vaccine.

Many have observed that some characteristics of COVID-19 bear a resemblance to HIV that could not have happened organically. The recent documentaryCold Case Hammarskjld,which won an award at last years Sundance film festival,puts forth a chillingtheory that a South African white supremacist organizationdeliberately spread HIV/AIDS among black Africans through vaccines in previous decades. The film begins as an investigation of the mysterious plane crash in Northern Rhodesia which killed Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjld in 1961. In 1998, a document authored by a shadowy paramilitary organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) was uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission justice assembly in post-apartheid South Africa which indicated that Hammarskjld was the victim of an assassination. Not only do the filmmakers discover in their inquiry the distinct likelihood that the plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary employed by SAIMR which was operating under orders from MI6 and the CIA, but the more stunning revelation is arecorded confessionfrom a former SAIMR soldier to havingdeliberately spread HIV/AIDS to black Africansthrough immunization. If what is claimed about SAIMR is true and that they were connected with Western intelligence, that the COVID-19 virus could be something deliberately spread is not outside the realm of possibility.

Maybe it will prove to be the case that the yellow presss version of the coronavirus beginning with the zoonotic transfer of the disease after the consumption of a pangolin or wild bat by a patient zero in Wuhan is accurate. Nevertheless, the pandemic should be a chilling reminder of the elites eco-fascist agenda and the continuous danger that the military-industrial complex puts the worlds population in by continuing to conduct dangerous research into deadly pathogens where the risk vastly outweighs the benefits. If the outbreak has led many to be suspicious of the official story, it is exactly because of the history of U.S. biological warfare and the elites potentially genocidal and pessimistic worldview that the only way to prevent the demise of humanity is by thinning the herd.

This article was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2020 at 7:20pm and is filed under China, COVID-19 (coronavirus), Disinformation, Health/Medical.

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Is the Global Pandemic a Product of the Elite's Malthusian Agenda and US Bio-warfare? - Dissident Voice

Emptying out of embassy and consulates has reduced opportunities to collaborate on coronavirus fight and maintain communication channels, wrote the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, referring to one of the largest evacuations of American diplomatic personnel in peacetime.

Washington closed its consulate in disease-ravaged Wuhan in late January. Beginning early February, as coronavirus spread across China, the U.S. began withdrawing diplomats and their families from that country.

Now, the U.S. is being blamed for tensions between Washington and Beijing. U.S. Drawdown of China Diplomats Cripples Ties at Critical Moment, is the title of the Wall Street Journal article. At a time when we should be building greater collaborative mechanisms to deal with the pandemicnever mind the other big issues like climate change and tradewere rupturing them across the board, said Orville Schell to the paper. In the Journals words, Schell, director of the Asia Societys Center on U.S.-China Relations, questioned Washingtons need to call back so many diplomats.

The sharp downturn in U.S.-China ties, however, is the result of a militant communist regime needing a foreign enemy, and the large number of U.S. diplomatic personnel on Chinese soil could be aggravatingnot helpingrelations between the two states.

Old ideologies die hard, but, as can be seen from Schells comments, none more so than engagement. The unshakable notion that guided American policy since the beginning of the 1970s was that the United States had to engage communist China, to bring it into the international system so that it would have a stake in the world. As a stakeholder, Beijing would see it to be in its interest to support multilateral institutions and enforce global rules and norms.

Unfortunately, Chinas regime became more belligerent as it grew stronger and more powerful. Inside the multilaterals, for instance, it weakened these institutions. In the case of the World Health Organization, it effectively made the body an arm of the Chinese Communist Party. Engagement theory should work and sounds good to the ear, but it has failed miserably.

Beijings behavior during the ongoing coronavirus epidemic is especially troubling. For instance, the Chinese military has been engaged in provocative maneuvers, particularly against Taiwan. In a recent incident, on the 16th of this month, more than ten Chinese speedboats rammed and otherwise harassed two of Taiwans coast guard vessels, severely damaging one of them. This was the second time this month that Chinas boats intruded into Taiwans territorial waters and caused an incident.

There have also been, in recent weeks, increased sea and air patrols by China in and around Japan.

Moreover, especially since the end of the first week of last month, the foreign ministry and the Communist Partys Global Times have been engaged in an inflammatory and dangerous disinformation campaign against America.

On March 12, China stated the origin of this disease was the United States and that the U.S. Army spread the coronavirus to Wuhan. These groundless and inflammatory claims, from foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, were made alongside other hostile pronouncements from him and his boss, like one accusing U.S. officials of immoral conduct.

The following day, the State Department called in Cui Tiankai, Chinas ambassador, to protest the grossly irresponsible charges, but since then Beijing, particularly through its ambassador to South Africa and state broadcaster China Central Television, has continued the campaign. Zhao also has not stopped his disingenuous campaign.

Why is this important? Because Chinas leaders, with their absurd theories, look like they are justifying in their own minds retaliation against the U.S. Zhao on the 12th intimated germ warfare against China.

In short, this would be an excellent time to deter Beijing. Beijing, however, has not been dissuaded by ordinary diplomatic tools. Whatever the reason for the especially hostile behavior, it is hard to see how the United States, even with a full complement of diplomats in China, could have in recent weeks coaxed the Chinese regime to better behavior.

So how does America dissuade China? We have to hit Chinese leaders with something that is contrary to what they expect us to do and which dislocates them psychologically, Arthur Waldron of the University of Pennsylvania told The National Interest on Saturday.

One way to do that would be to start expelling Chinese diplomats in the United States and perhaps closing their consulates. Beijing has to understand that the god of engagement ideology, at least in the American capital, is dead.

Moreover, given Beijings new xenophobia, it would be good to repatriate even more American diplomats from China. The last thing the U.S. should do is leave potential hostages in place. Beijing has been taking innocentssome of them Americanand there is no point keeping a store of them on hand for China to grab.

Of course, tit-for-tat expulsions could leave no diplomat on station, either in China or the United States. That might be okay with Beijing, however. From 1967 to 1969, China had only one ambassador abroadin Egyptand even he was almost recalled.

A lack of contact is not necessarily a bad thing for America. Moving to no in-country diplomats certainly qualifies as Waldrons psychological dislocation. The Chinese need to know that Americans no longer think that their regime is, in the scheme of things, that important. Unfortunately, American leaders have been feeding the already inflated egos of the Chinese by appearing desperate to communicate and maintaining in their country one of the largest U.S. diplomatic missions anywhere. Reducing diplomatic personnel, therefore, could have an immediate beneficial effect.

In any event, the two powers can maintain ties with zero Chinese diplomats in the U.S. and zero American ones in China. As Waldron, a China historian and holder of a chair in international relations, pointed out to me at the end of last week, All you really need is one phone line.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang.

FILE PHOTO: Chinese Yuan banknotes are seen behind illuminated stock graph in this illustration taken February 10, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo.

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Donald Trump Can't Cooperate with China on Coronavirus - The National Interest

Humanity's greatest predator: A laboratory recreation of the H1N1 virus that killed untold millions in 1918.

Image: BSIP / Universal Images Group via Getty

The coronavirus is nothing next to the supremely deadly flu virus of 1918, at least not yet. But when you delve into the history of that epidemic, the main comparison with today becomes clear. It's in our "it can't happen here" attitude.

In 1918, modern medicine had made the world seem clean and safe. Scientists had discovered and defeated the bacterial pathogens behind many of history's biggest killers. We hadn't figured out what influenza was, exactly, but it was a known quantity, a seasonal annoyance, really deadly only to the elderly. Doctors weren't required to report it. There hadn't been a global flu outbreak in 25 years, not since the Russian flu of 1891. There was a war on, but the U.S. was congratulating itself on how disease-free its military camps were.

That mindset persisted even after what we now know as the H1N1 flu virus made itself known, likely starting in the U.S. Though its first wave, in the spring, was fast-moving, this flu's effects were relatively mild. Summer stopped it in its tracks.

There was no warning whatsoever that it would come roaring back in the fall, having mutated like an X-men villain into a terrifying killer of the young and healthy. It was a supervirus that seemed nothing like the flu, one that might, within hours of infection, make you collapse in the street, your lungs filling with fluids, gasping for air as your face turned purple and you slowly, literally, drowned.

Fluid on the floor: One of the few 1918 photos to show the victims, here in a makeshift volunteer Red Cross overflow hospital in Oakland.

Image: Underwood Archives / Getty Images

This is the true and still largely unknown story of the flu pandemic of 1918-19, the world's deadliest medical holocaust to date. Unknown? Well, if you're reasonably well up on your history, you probably recall a few facts.

First, that it happened, which is a step up from the 20th century, when it wasn't even taught in college. ("I took a course in virology," says New York Times science reporter and microbiology major Gina Kolata in her book Flu, "but the 1918 flu was never mentioned.") Second, that it struck at the end of World War I and was spread in part by troop movements. And third, that it killed between 50 and 100 million people or more than the combat death toll of World War I and World War II combined in little over a year.

But you probably don't know the difference between its three waves. Or that the "Spanish flu" name that clings to the pandemic is fake news; it's far more likely to have started in Kansas. Or that it killed more thirtysomethings than sixtysomethings. And while it is true that medical science and practice has advanced significantly since then, it is absolutely terrifying to discover that even though we have nailed down its DNA, we still can't figure out how, where or why that virus mutated.

The defining feature of 1918 flu history is how little we truly know and how powerless we would be, even now, to stop a successfully mutated virus like that one from killing millions. Here's what we most need to remember right now.

U.S. newspapers belatedly begin to report on the flu in November 1918 with a positive post-racial spin.

Image: Fototeca Gilardi / Getty Images

Remember this next time you hear a talking head on cable news bloviating about how the disease caused by the new coronavirus, or, officially, COVID-19, came from bat soup in China: We've had over a century to try to figure out where and how the 1918 flu started, and we're still arguing about it. But theories that it began in Vietnam or China in 1915 or 1916 lost ground in recent years to a theory that it began in...the very middle of America.

A January 1918 doctor's report to the government from Haskell County, Kansas, stands as the first testament to any unusual flu activity in the world that year. Remember, this reporting wasn't required, so it had to be a big deal. Haskell had many migratory birds and hog farms; we now know that bird and human viruses like to meet and mutate inside the cells of pigs. And Haskell men visited nearby Camp Funston, which reported the first of 24 U.S. Army outbreaks in March 1918. The doughboys then took the virus to Europe.

One place we can be sure the virus didn't come from is Spain. So why did countries around the world immediately start calling it "Spainish Flu" or "The Spanish Lady?" For the simple reason that Spain was neutral in World War I. It had no reason to censor its press, whereas newspapers in the U.S. and Europe were prevented by their governments from printing anything that might lower morale for the war effort.

That, publishers thought, included flu outbreaks. Even when U.S. newspapers started paying attention to the epidemic by listing numbers of new cases, they often put a positive or admonishing spin on their stories. "Worry is useless," advised the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Talk of cheerful things instead." One columnist in another paper took to task "nervous and excited people who think every pain is a symptom of the flu."

So irresponsible rumors crept into the gaps left by official reports, as they always do. When the deadly fall wave of mutated flu began in Boston, wild (and false) stories spread that it was a germ warfare attack by Germany. Or that agents of the Kaiser had somehow embedded the sickness in aspirin tablets, made by German company Bayer. Which was, ironically, about the only thing people could take at the time to reduce fever.

And what did Spain get for sounding the alarm and reporting accurately? It got saddled with the supposed origin and the very name of the disease for a century or more. No good deed goes unpunished.

U.S. president Woodrow Wilson arrives in Paris for peace talks, 1919. He may already have flu in this photo.

Image: HULTON archive / Getty Images

In April 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson came down with the flu during its third and final wave which was deadlier than any outbreak in history except the wave that had preceded it. Wilson survived, but exhibited signs of neurological damage from the sickness and was never the same again. Unknown to anyone at the time, the flu had set Europe on course for World War II.

That's because Wilson got sick in the middle of the Versailles peace conference that officially ended World War I. Now, Wilson may have been an avowed racist, but at least he went to France planning to forge a global peace that didn't involve France trying to bankrupt Germany. Without Wilson as an effective presence, that's exactly what happened. The Versailles treaty was ridiculously punitive and, well, hello, Hitler.

Ironically, Wilson had set the wheels of his own destruction in motion. He had been responsible for many of the previous year's troop movements that spread the flu in the first place. He agreed with his generals that "the shipment of troops must not be stopped for any reason." His surgeon general said "the present generation" had been "spoiled" by excellent medical care, and shouldn't rush to their doctors with "mild cases" of flu.

Wilson was far from the only luminary to have a life-threatening flu encounter. Kaiser Wilhelm II celebrated news of the "Flanders fever," as the Germans called it, because it attacked French troops first. But flu easily crossed trench lines, and the kaiser fell sick before he was forced to abdicate. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose government censored flu reports, got so sick that he had to wear a respirator. This news, too, was censored.

Unnamed baseball players wearing masks while perfectly healthy, 1918.

Image: George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images

It's the one defining feature when you look back through 1918 archives: Everyone, it seems, wore masks. There are pictures of public officials wearing masks, barbers wearing masks, men who didn't wear masks being barred by an officious bus conductor. There are local laws about wearing masks in public, determining the exact thickness of gauze, or cheesecloth, that your mask had to be.

But then as now, the mask craze didn't do much to slow the spread of the virus. Then as now, there was little point in uninfected people wearing them. Then as now, mask use should have been confined to those who were actually sick, and to medical workers.

What might have helped? Obviously, a greater emphasis on hand hygiene. More and faster reporting of flu locations, and a more robust government response. Cutting down on those troop movements as much as possible, and on large gatherings such as the infamous Liberty Bond rally in Philadelphia that infected thousands at once. Within 72 hours, every hospital bed in the city was filled.

But humans will be humans, and they will gather together. How were authorities supposed to stop them from celebrating the end of World War I in the streets that November? What public health campaign could prevent entire villages around the world from coming out to celebrate the joyful return of their soldier boys, dooming themselves in the process? This, perhaps, is why the 1918 flu was rarely taught in schools: It had a grim inevitability to it, one that showcased how powerless we are to prevent catastrophe coming at us from all angles.

It is in these stories that we can glimpse the seeds of inevitable future pandemics. No modern medical system can withstand an influx of flu victims on the scale of 1918. If hospitals get overwhelmed, that's a force multiplier for all kinds of casualties. And unless you ban every conference and concert, or shut down every movie theater, successful viruses will do what successful viruses will do: spread faster than you can stop them.

The best we can do is not be as complacent as the people of 1918 and choose leadership that offers reality-based responses.

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Coronavirus and what we can learn from the 1918 flu's hidden history - Mashable

On February 8 1977, in the thronged lobby of the Avco Embassy Theatre in Los Angeles, Richard Harris threatened to kill a film critic.

More precisely, he threatened to have his new best friend, footballer and all-American hero OJ Simpson, kill the critic. He began to sweat. I kept whispering, Im gonna smash you in the mouth. And OJs gonna kill you, Harris would later tell chat show host Johnny Carson and his 19 million viewers. And he kept sweating.

David Sheehan was a doyen of Los Angeles film criticism. This at a time when film criticism still carried genuine clout and an unkind review could shut down a movie. Sheehan, as it happened, had taken a strong dislike to Harris and OJ Simpsons pandemic-themed new feature, The Cassandra Crossing though that hadnt put him off attending its US premiere at the Avco on Wilshire Boulevard.

Harris, who, as a producer, had a financial stake in The Cassandra Crossing, wasnt taking the negative assessment on the chin. As the booze flowed and the finger-food was wolfed down he, with new bestie OJ in tow, confronted Sheehan.

Ashen-faced, the reviewer slunk off. Smiling and possibly high-fiving Harris and OJ retired to the bar. Their work for the night was done. But for Harris the long campaign to promote The Cassandra Crossing had only started. He would spend the next several months banging a drum for a disaster thriller that was starting to look more disastrous than thrilling.

Its an incredible picture, he would humbly proclaim to Johnny Carson. David Sheehan said its the Poseidon Adventure on wheels who needs another? Well, its dynamite.

Forty-three years on, the Cassandra Crossing has aged as only a terrible Seventies movie can. And yet, with its killer virus plot, it has suddenly acquired a horribly relevancy. Four-decades old and creaky even at the time, this five-star clunker nonetheless feels rippedfrom tomorrows headlines.

As it happens the specifics of the lethal infection around which the story is built are rather glossed over. We know the lethal strain is bacterial and induces a fatal bout of pneumonia (or not, see below). And that, if it ever gets lose, it could bring civilisation to a stand-still. So much for the escapist magic of cinema.

The biggest distinction between Cassandra-virus and coronavirus is that the former is man-made. Specifically its been cooked-up by the American military at a black-ops lab at the Geneva HQ of the World Health Organisation (then the International Health Organisation). Yes, this is a film so ludicrous it starts from the premise that the pandemic escapes from the headquarters of the WHO.

The silliness is quickly ramped up. Three eco-terrorists stage a raid on the WHO, trying to steal the lethal formula and expose the USA. One is shot, another captured after contracting the virus. The third flees and hastily boards an Orient Express-style transcontinental train bound for Stockholm.

In short order hes sweating his lungs out, though he isnt in so bad a state that he cant blag his way into first class. He also manages to high-five a six-year-old and sneeze all over a pot of rice about to be served for dinner. Quicker than you can say flatten the sombrero a horrible plague has been unleashed, albeit for the moment confined to the train.

Like all awful terrible Seventies films, the Cassandra Crossing features a random assortment of household names. Harris plays world-famous neurologist Jonathan Chamberlain this being the Seventies, neurologists could still aspire to global celebrity. But whats he doing on a train from Switzerland to Sweden? Well, its obviously because hes afraid of flying.

Also bunking down in first is Chamberlains ex-wife Jennifer Rispoli. She is portrayed by Sophia Loren, significant other the Cassandra Crossings Italian mogul producer Carlo Ponti (who discovered Loren when she was a 16 year-old in a local modelling contest in Naples). They are joined by Martin Sheens Robby Navarro,a drug smuggler passing himself off as toyboy of ageing arms-dealer matriarch Nicole Dressler (Ava Gardner).

Navarro is meanwhile being pursued by OJ Simpsons Haley, a Drug Enforcement Agency official disguised as a priest (obviously). He shares a cabin with Herman Kaplan, a holocaust survivor played by famous method-acting guru Lee Strasberg. Somehow Vincent Price, William Shatner, Oliver Reed and Kenneth Williams avoided being cast in the film, though goodness knows how.

The biggest mystery is obviously the presence of the enigmatic Strasberg, who picked his parts judiciously.The Cassandra Crossing was his first movie since the Godfather Part II, for which he was nominated for best supporting actor as Jewish mobster Hyman Roth. Quite why he had signed up to this load of viral rubbish is lost in the mists of antiquity. Maybe he, like Harris, was just chasing a massive payday.

The glitzy crew was topped off by Burt Lancaster as US Colonel Stephen MacKenzie. Lancaster comes off as under-enthused to put it mildly. Yet his character is by far the most fascinating.

Post-Watergate and with the smoke still clearing from Vietnam, Americans of the period had little difficulty believing the worst of their Government. So they may not have been shocked as it is revealed that, far from trying to save the infected passengers, MacKenzies job is to ensure they are quietly made to disappear and the truth about Uncle Sams bio-weapon buried with them.

Officially, the train is being re-routed to an abandoned concentration camp in Poland. There, passengers will be assessed and put into quarantine. However, the steel arch bridge they must cross, the Kasundruv Bridge or Cassandra Crossing, is on the verge of collapse. Under the weight of the train it will surely tumble downwards (the bridge is fictional, with the Alec Eiffel-designedGarabit Viaductin the Massif Central its proxy).

Thats what MacKenzie is counting on. Unfortunately for him, Strasbergs Holocaust survivor remembers the bridge from the war and is aware how unstable it is. He tips off Harriss Doctor Chamberlain.

This prompts Chamberlain and the other a-listers to stage a fightback against the US soldiers sent aboard in their protective suits and masks to lock down the train. Meanwhile it emerges that the lethal infection isnt quite so lethal the infected come down with a terrible flu but quickly recover, suffering nothing other than a huge appetite.

Cue clunky action scenes, model-railway level special effects and a stonkingly unsatisfying denouement. As the train chugs towards the crossing, Strasbergs Herman Kaplan makes his way to the front and blows himself up.

This blindsides the Americans (apparently content to hurtle to their deaths) and gives Harris and the gang an opportunity to hit the emergency brakes. Half the train still goes over in a sequence that resembles an outtake from Gerry Andersons Thunderbirds. But not the half containing our heroes.

Yet if clearly dreadful at every level Harris clearly didnt even go to the trouble of visiting the barbers before arriving on set at Romes Cinecitt Studios the Cassandra Crossing is nonetheless fantastically watchable. And not just because of coronavirus. Harris, who took the part after Peter OToole turned it down, radiates feckless charisma. He really is just here for the paycheque and visibly struggling to take it seriously.

Then you have OJ, still lining out for the Buffalo Bills in the NFL and summoning all the nuance of a running back breaking a tackle at full pelt. And he is, incredibly, sharing the screen with acting doyen Strasberg. Its like having Claude Monet present a make-and-do art segment on Rainbow, with George and Zippy helping out.

I watch OJ with great fascination, Strasberg would say. He has something which you dont only get from training or from work. He has a marvellous personal quality that comes over and is very wonderful.

Being captain of the football team is like being a director, OJ ventured from the set. Im just trying my best to be as fine an actor as I can be. Im trying to learn about the profession. And, especially when Im with Lee Strasberg, I have an awful lot to learn.

The Cassandra Crossing arrived at the tail-end of the disaster movie craze. As David Sheehan had picked up on in the review that so incensed Richard Harris, the Poseidon Adventure was a clear reference point.

As was the Towering Inferno. This was acknowledged by script writer Tom Mankiewicz (Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun). Hired by Ponti to give the screenplay a last-minute polish, he immediately dubbed the project the Towering Germ.

Sophia and Carlo asked me to do a major rewrite on a film they were making, Mankiewiczwould explain in his autobiography .

The Cassandra Crossing co-starred Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. It was at the height of the disaster movie craze. In this case hundreds of European passengers were trapped and sealed inside a train filled with a deadly virus intended for biological warfare. Privately, I called it the Towering Germ.

Yet this apparently typical Hollywood film was anything but. The Cassandra Crossing was a British-Italian joint venture. In his memoirs, producer and impresario Lew Grade remembers Ponti coming to see him in London with a new project. Grades first and only question was: how much?

Ponti may have struck Grade as stressed. The producer, part of a movement of Italian filmmakers who wanted to build their own Hollywood at the sprawling Cinecitt complex, had recently survived a kidnapping attempt. He had been driving on the Appian Way in Rome when a car pulled alongside and riddled his with bullets.

It was among hundreds of planned abductions during Italys notorious years of lead when left and right-wing terrorists tried to overturn the social order. There was to be a second failed kidnapping 12 months later. And a year after that Ponti would be arrested and later convicted of currency smuggling.

Details of the charges are lost to antiquity. But it must have had something to do with the Cassandra Crossing, as Harris and Gardner were also accused of illegally exporting from Italy currency and art works worth $10 million (the charges against the stars were later dropped).

By that point, everyone involved may have wished they could forget the Cassandra Crossing. Though it performed respectably in Europe and in the Far East, in America it was chewed up and spat out.

This was nothing less than a Hollywood conspiracy, believed its Greco-Italian director George Pan Cosmatos. He railed against the vested interests he felt were trying to sink the Cassandra Crossing, whilst promoting it in Chicago.

I hate people who hate my movie, said Cosmatos, later to direct Rambo: First Blood Part II and decently-regarded Wyatt Earp Western, Tombstone. I love my film. If people say they dont like it, its like saying my baby is no goodPeople dont like the fact we didnt film the movie in Hollywood.

The only person who seems to have fond memories is Martin Sheen. Perhaps he looks back on the Cassandra Crossing as the calm before the storm. It was while shooting in Rome that he received a call from Francis Ford Coppola to join him in the Philippines for the straightforward new Vietnam movie he was shooting called Apocalypse Now. What could possibly go wrong?

The Cassandra Crossing may not have been one of the best movies ever made but it was the most fun Id ever had on a set and one of the most talented casts Ive worked with, Sheen wrote in his autobiography. In addition to Ava and OJ there were also Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Lee Strasberg and, in the role of the heroine, Carlo Pontis wife the legendary Sophia Loren. The kids would come on the set and not recognise anyone except OJ, who was still playing football for the Buffalo Bills at the time .

Romes Cinecitt Studios lived up to its name. he continued. While we were doing the Cassandra Crossing, Federico Fellini was a few sound stages over shooting Casanova with Donald Sutherland in the lead role. Emilio [EstevezSheens son] would meet me for lunch at the commissary and Sutherland would be there outfitted in a long powdered wig and the ruffles and buckles of an 18th-century Venetian dandy [Casanova would go on to win the Oscar for best best costume design].

Max von Sydow would show up in a military uniform shooting The Desert of the Tartars and wed sit with Sophia Loren in full makeup and OJ Simpson wearing the black and white Roman collar. Just eating lunch at Cinecitt was like being inside a Fellini film.

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Sophia Loren and OJ Simpson catch the plague: is The Cassandra Crossing the stupidest pandemic movie ever made? - Telegraph.co.uk