The appearance of a new strain of coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan last month, which has since spread to more than 20 countries, has sparked social media-driven panic around the world. People are scouring the Internet for information about this coronavirus outbreak, which the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency, and they are being bombarded with information dealing with both the reasons why it appeared, and whether or not it could spread to become a global pandemic.
The deadly novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is currently thought to have originated in wild animals like bats, but this theory has yet to be scientifically proven.
The American Project Syndicate media organization has published dogmatic and undisguised anti-Chinese propaganda, without going into any detail on the medical side of the problem, claiming that the affliction of Chinese autocracy is responsible for the coronavirus epidemic.
An article available on the online Turkish news portal OdaTV states that “the epidemic in China can be interpreted as a biological attack,” stressing that China’s coronavirus outbreak is directly related to America’s geopolitical interests, a country which has long been using indirect strategies in its war with rival China. The piece provides points to support this argument, noting that Washington is trying to reign in China’s growth, prevent the country from implementing its One Belt One Road initiative, and lower Chinese economic output. The United States is using its naval fleet and allies to surround China in the Pacific, preventing China from circumventing the Strait of Malacca, fomenting unrest, blocking China from accessing Eurasia over land through East Turkestan, and using sanctions and trade wars to try and undermine China’s production and economy And although it is currently hard to say for sure whether the virus originated naturally or artificially, whether it was used as a biological weapon as part of the bigger war between China and the US, one thing is clear, which is that the coronavirus epidemic that has broken out in China will have a profound effect on the country, and it will naturally affect Chinese manufacturing, trade, the economy, and Chinese priorities, which the United States will clearly benefit from.
A similar position is taken in the Norwegian news outlet Steigan, suggesting that we reflect on the fact that the United States is now feeling very intimidated by China’s rapid growth, is already waging a trade war against China, and it is not too far-fetched that certain American politicians could well have resorted to biological warfare. The publication makes another point to back up the argument that this is a possibility, reminding people the United States is already working on a number of military plans to ensure US world domination. Of particular note is the US plan to hack Russia’s power grid and shut down power plants, which The New York Times wrote about in 2019, and the US are intensifying their cyberattacks. The American strategy which has been implemented since 2012 has entered an offensive phase, with the aggressive introduction of potentially crippling malware, and at a depth hat has never been tried before. Even if you do not believe that the coronavirus was created intentionally, the fact that it would have been possible should be enough to set alarm bells ringing for many.
Indian researchers have cast doubt over whether the new coronavirus could have a natural origin, and have questioned segments of its RNA, as they are unlike those of other coronaviruses such as SARS, and instead appear to be closer to those of HIV. The scientists found that the spikes which form the “crown” of the virus in short regions of proteins are genetic inserts which bear resemblance to pieces of the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV-1. The researchers pointed out that these kinds of inserts are not found in other coronaviruses. In other words, if the virus had mutated in a natural way, it would not have been able to receive insertions from the immunodeficiency virus.
Oddly enough, it should also be noted that the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is similar to other coronaviruses, such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which was first discovered in Saudi Arabia (2012) and subsequently spread to other countries in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. The new coronavirus also shares similarities with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which was first discovered in China in 2002 and spread to countries all over the world, but SARS was quickly brought under control and contained, and there were no more cases of contraction recorded after 2004. MERS and SARS are both coronaviruses. There are suspicions that these viruses were created in laboratories, tested on animals, and they could only have been transmitted to people through human intervention. The viruses were then bioengineered to make it possible for them to be spread from human to human. Both SARS and the new 2019-nCoV virus also have a feature which ethnic Han Chinese are more susceptible to.
Considering this information, it is not surprising that a number of media outlets in different countries have begun exploring the link between the outbreak of the new 2019-nCoV virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan and activities sponsored by the CIA and the Pentagon at over a hundred secret and obscure biological laboratories engaged in the manufacturing and testing of biological warfare agents. A few years ago, one of these laboratories registered in Ukraine was uncovered, which was working on a virus that ethnic Russians would be susceptible to. Since there is no one “Russian race” and Russia is a multiethnic state, it is reported that the initial trials failed.
However, these suspicions that the CIA or the Pentagon could possibly have secretly planned to use the new 2019-nCoV virus as a biological weapon did not just appear out of nowhere. Let’s not forget the secret Operation Big Itch, which the CIA tried to implement in 1954. Back then, they carried out the biological weapons tests at a remote US Army facility in the Utah desert. Their goal was to determine whether it would be possible to use tropical rat fleas (Xenopsyllacheopis, a species discovered in Egypt in 1901 and named after Pharaoh Cheops) in biological warfare as a disease vector. The fleas were carriers of plague bacteria, and the “researchers” wanted to determine how the they could be used for mass infection. Two sub-munitions of biological cluster bombs were even developed simultaneously: the E14 bomb designed to hold 100,000 insects, and the E23 bomb for twice the massive amount.
As for bats, and whether they could have been used in secret bioweapon programs, as Bulgarian sources note, we should not forget that bats are a source of Ebola, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and other deadly diseases. The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) which funds the America’s secret biolabs is conducting a number of studies on pathogens of military importance in bats as part of biological weapons research in its Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and there are also projects for ethnicity-targeted biological weapons (biogenetic weapons), which primarily attack specific ethnic groups or genotypes. Although there has never been any official public confirmation that these weapons are being developed, documents show that the United States has long been collecting biological material from certain ethnic groups, particularly from ethnic Russians and Chinese. For instance, the US Air Force has been specifically collecting Russian RNA and synovial tissue samples for a federal project, which is even published on the US Federal Contractor Registration.
Vladimir Odintsov, expert politologist, exclusively for the online magazine ‘New Eastern Outlook’.
