White House trade advisor and prominent Sinophobe Peter Navarro was interviewed yesterday by ABC's George Stephanopoulos. The interview provides a convenient encapsulation of Trump's reelection strategy of scapegoating China for the coronavirus pandemic.
The United States might be a faltering hyper-power, but it remains unrivaled when it comes to capitalizing on crises. By blaming China, the Trump administration hopes to dodge voter retribution in November at the same time braking the Dragon's global economic growth.
It is unclear to me how much blame can be ascribed to China. If patient zero was diagnosed on November 17 of last year in Wuhan, what do we make of the patient in France who was diagnosed on November 16?
Much too much is unknown about COVID-19. For instance, what are we to make of the spike in multi-system inflammatory disease among children?
At this point I don't think that we can rule out a man-made origin of the coronavirus. The mainstream press dismisses man-made origin, as Mike Baker did recently in "When Did the Coronavirus Arrive in the U.S.? Here’s a Review of the Evidence":
Dr. Bedford [of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle] said there was no evidence of genetic engineering in the virus, noting that it appeared to be a genetic outgrowth of a virus circulating among bats. It probably reached humans through an intermediate animal, such as a pangolin, he said.
“There’s no hallmarks of it having been manipulated in a lab,” Dr. Bedford said. “I think that’s definitive.”
He did not, however, rule out the possibility that some version of the virus being studied by scientists in Wuhan could have somehow escaped and spread from there. But he doubts that is the case. He said that the most prevalent theory about the virus’s origins — that it spread naturally among animals at a live animal market in Wuhan, then jumped to humans — was the most likely explanation.But Kate Charlet's point in "The New Killer Pathogens" is that no such definitive statement is possible when it comes to genetic modification in a lab:
Ultimately, the power of these disincentives hinges on the ability to determine that an attack has occurred and to identify its source. For now, investigators looking at a pathogen in the aftermath of an attack would not necessarily be able to tell if gene-editing techniques had been used.
We are not that far from the Tuskeegee experiments when the US was willing to infect and watch people (black men) to suffer and die in the name of science. In 1945, along with the Nazi rocket scientists the US army imported Nazi biologists who worked on finding the most horrible viruses and other biological agents to use in war. This is well-documented in Annie Jacobsen's OPERATION PAPERCLIP. One Nazi scientist suggested that Americans might be interested in LSD and by the fifties it became one of the tools in the US' mind control program. Anthrax was yet another sickness studied and improved. In 1965 the Marburg virus escaped from a biological lab in Marburg, Germany. The Marburg virus was actually Ebola, another bat disease.
ReplyDeleteIt's been 75 years since the Nazi scientists arrived in the US. Considering the other developments in science over the last seventy-five years, and considering the "discoverer" of HIV/AIDS had been working for Litton Bionetics, a military contractor, to find an AIDS-like disease five years before AIDS itself began appearing, no one should be shocked that our government and the governments of some of our allies have developed these horrible weapons.
There is a means of creating viruses without actually inserting genetic material in them. You take a virus that meets the criteria for a "good" plague virus and then grow it in a laboratory. Viruses mutate all the time. You essentially harvest the most deadly, the most easily transmissible from other species and among humans. You keep on growing the most deadly strains of the virus. Directed evolution. Voila. Worldwise plague. This is the same process that humans have used for tens of thousands of years to domesticate crops and animals.
This is the world, the country we live in.