Corona conspiracies

April 13, 2020

I RECEIVE an email from The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has published a report putting the blame for the COVID-19 pandemic squarely at the door of China, explaining that its initial cover-ups allowed the disease to spread much further than it would otherwise have done.

It claims that the first case was identified in November 17, more than a month earlier than China admits. It adds: 

The denial of information, outright fabrications, and disregard for human life - both within and outside of China’s borders - is so shocking and pervasive that the contracting of the virus by millions worldwide and the resultant death toll was not only foreseeable but entirely avoidable. 

The authors say “the PRC had deliberately prevented the dissemination of knowledge necessary to stop the illness from spreading”. 

The assumption is that early attempts by the Wuhan authorities to shut down rumours of a new SARS outbreak were part of a concerted strategy by the Communist Party monolith, rather than the actions of a local authority terrified of the political repercussions of a scary infectious disease emerging in their jurisdiction.  

Some of the most absurd U.S.-based conspiracies argue that the “Chi-Coms” did all this deliberately, and that it was effectively an act of biowarfare against the rest of the world. Some, including babbling bullfrog Alex Jones, continue to spawn random theories about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, saying it either manufactured the virus itself or bought it from, er, Barack Obama or the Canadians.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation posits a subtler conspiracy in which the Chinese allow a naturally occuring virus to spread overseas on the assumption that they were far better prepared and would come out of the crisis better than anyone else.

When the marauding Mongols wanted to spread plague in the besieged Genoan entrepôt of Caffa, they catapulted infected cadavers over the city walls. Now, all that is required are aeroplanes packed with pathogens and flying to and from every nation. Can we imagine a scenario in which China knew what was coming, and knew its own extensive security apparatus and containment measures could limit the damage? Can we imagine a scenario in which the Chinese government knew how woefully ill-prepared the rest of the world would be?

The authors of the report come close to making this argument. China must have known how serious this was in mid-January, but instead of issuing the necessary warnings, it was still saying there was no clear evidence of “human-to-human transmission”. At the same time, it had embarked on a global campaign to secure medical supplies. Basically, while underplaying the outbreak in public, it was secretly preparing for the worst.

Just because China might end up benefiting from this pandemic doesn’t necessarily mean they engineered it all in the first place. Cui bono rarely tells the entire story.  Just because George W. Bush and his cronies benefited from the Twin Tower attacks doesn’t mean he ordered them to take place. Just because Harold Wilson replaced the late Hugh Gaitskell as leader of the Labour Party doesn’t mean that he actually poisoned him. JFK’s assassination allowed Lyndon Johnson to achieve his life’s ambition and become President, but that does not constitute evidence that Johnson actually had Kennedy murdered.

And to disavow the conspiracy theories doesn’t mean one is a patsy of Beijing. There are easier ways to castigate China. Instead of trying to postulate that leaders ordered a lab to manufacturer a deadly bioweapon and deliberately unleashed it on the rest of the world, one can simply blame the Wuhan authorities for the initial cover-up, and an authoritarian, overly-centralised political system for its lack of transparency and inability to properly distribute information to the areas where it is required the most.    

The authors say China should be expelled from the World Health Organization, and must pay reparations. But all this talk about cover-ups does not really explain how China managed to contain the virus within four months and keep the number of deaths at a level that seems, in retrospect, to be remarkably low compared to Europe and the United States. That’s why the discrediting of China also rests on the hypothesis that its numbers are inaccurate. Here, the authors point to reports about urns and twenty-four hour cremations and the very real possibility that many bodies were cremated in the early stages before they could even be tested, but so far there is no smoking gun. 

An essay on China Change, a dissident website, estimates that the total death toll in the city of Wuhan between January 23 and March 23 is probably more than 20,000, eight times the official figure. My hunch, like many other people’s, is that China had significantly underestimated its total case numbers as well as its deaths, especially during the early stages of the outbreak, but here, the maths, and the assumptions behind it, aren’t entirely convincing.

Conspiracy theory and infectious disease have always been bedfellows. Back in the time of SARS, Russian “scientists” were claiming it was a hybrid of HIV and measles that had been spliced together in a lab. Conspiracy theorists spread similar rumours that HIV was manufactured by the Soviets and spread through Africa by the World Health Organization, or was a CIA plot to destroy African-Americans.

Backed by a spurious scientific paper originating in India and subsequently withdrawn, cranks very early on claimed that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that contained synthetic HIV “insertions”. But right now, despite all the social media bloviating, there isn’t a shred of a scintilla of an iota of proof that SARS-CoV-2 came out of a lab.