More Corona conspiracies

August 13, 2020

ANOTHER CONSPIRACY theory has become popular on Chinese social media, presumably because it puts the blame for the COVID-19 squarely on the United States.

It purports to be a confession written by an anonymous U.S./Indian bioweapons developer who spent much of her career serving the interests of U.S. Big Pharma, including Gilead Sciences Inc. 

The author begins by casually admitting she was intimately involved in developing Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in a lab “to test the effects of a new medicine but dodge the federal restrictions”. She then lists a number of scientists involved in manufacturing the global pandemic, including Professor Frank Plummer, a real-life infectious disease specialist who died of a heart attack in February, making him a very convenient part of many a conspiracy theory - much to the anger and frustration of his widow.

The author also introduces “Zhengli-Li Shi” as the Chinese scientist who provided a fictional “science maniac” by the name of Professor Baric (and villain of this conspiracy) with the “gene fragments” required to synthesise “a new type of virus”. This is no doubt a reference to Shi Zhengli, who has famously specialised in identifying coronaviruses in bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

To cut a rambling story short, the virus was unleashed somewhere or other, possibly in South America, and an infected sailor then “happened to seal the virus into the package of seafood which was transported into the seafood market in Wuhan”. Professor Plummer was then “assassinated” on a plane from Kenya to China to stop him from sharing his knowledge with Chinese colleagues about how the virus could be stopped.

Throughout the text, technical terms and other bits and pieces from (published) scientific papers are copied and pasted in order to generate a sort of spurious verisimilitude, and some of these ideas are then crudely extrapolated into a frenzy of conspiracy mania with all the familiar conspiracy tropes, including the one in which the CIA is blamed for deliberately distributing a pathogen that targets non-Caucasians. This particular idea has long been associated with AIDS and Ebola.  

Ultimately, at the apex of this global conspiracy, orchestrated by the mysterious Baric and his minions alongside Gilead Sciences, BlackRock and the Center for Disease Control, is none other than Jared Kushner, who - lest we forget - happens to be Jewish, just to add a crucial dash of antisemitism to this pathetic piffle. 

Last month, the super-soaraway Sunday Times has added yet another layer to the COVID-19 origins conspiracy, alleging that China began covering up the disease as early as 2012 following an outbreak of a mysterious, SARS-like viral pneumonia among workers in a copper mine in Yunnan.

The gist of this “investigation” is that that the RaTG13 strain found in bats or bat faeces was then stored in the Wuhan Institute of Virology where, er, it was allowed to mutate or deliberately manipulated in order to make it more lethal and infectious.  

This, for some reason, reminds me of Vyvyan in The Young Ones, who invented a potion that turns anyone who drinks it into an axe-wielding homicidal maniac. “It’s basically a cure - for not being an axe-wielding homicidal maniac,” Vyv said. 

In any case, it appears to be true that the institute was involved in experiments aimed at improving the way viruses cause disease, which is known as “gain of function” research, and even some proper scientists are suspicious. Professor Richard Ebright at Rutgers University claims that the techniques known to be in use at the Wuhan lab could easily have been deployed to create the novel coronavirus.

And yet, others insist that no lab could ever have come up with the changes required to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2. Professor Nigel McMillan of Griffith University in Australia said, “If you were going to design it in a lab the sequence changes make no sense as all previous evidence would tell you it would make the virus worse.” 

RaTG13 shares about 96% of its DNA with SARS-CoV-2, which sounds ominous but actually does not in itself provide any proof that the latter was derived from the former. Remember that we share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, but that doesn’t mean we evolved from them. What it means is that we have a shared ancestor. 

Most researchers say there is no sign that any part of SARS-CoV-2 were spliced in artificially. But one other theory that was being peddled a few months back pointed to another way of manipulating viruses through culturing and forcing it to adapt in ways that would make it more infectious to humans. Nikolai Petrovsky at Flinders University said the way the coronavirus binds to human ACE2 is so strong that it is “either a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention.” 

GLOBAL coronavirus cases have now exceeded 20 million. Yesterday and today, I spent some time reading my real-time responses to this pandemic over the course of the last seven months or so. At the start, my instinct was rather like Trump’s. I sought to play it down, and to insist there was no reason to panic. I said it would be no worse than SARS. I wanted to insist that this was a trauma facing people like me, who were brave enough to live in the seething viral stew of China. No one else had a clue what we had to go through! 

It goes without saying that I was very quickly overtaken by events. By March or so, I was already starting to feel intellectually unsettled and a little foolish, not only because of my optimistic forecasts, but because of the tenor of my reporting, which emphasised that this was always a Chinese problem, and an indictment of Chinese governance and cultural practices. Eventually, many of my assumptions were overturned, especially as one developed, industrialised, democratic country after another proved institutionally incapable of coping. Had this disease emerged in Miami or Milan or Manchester, no one could now feel assured that the stripped-down, hollowed-out do-nothing governments of the West could have stopped it from spreading elsewhere. Is anyone, anywhere, still convinced that Trump or Boris Johnson or any of the moribund political bodies in the United States and the United Kingdom could have done better than China when it comes to containing this pandemic? 

And this, I think, partly explains the popularity of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory. It is a last-gasp attempt to maintain that Western sense of cultural and political superiority. It is an attempt to explain that we didn’t handle the coronavirus as well as we should have done, not because of the flaws at the heart of our political systems, but because China broke the rules of conduct, obfuscating and prevaricating until it got its precious trade deal with the United States.

Instead of admitting that our governments are not fit for purpose, we accuse Beijing of deliberately unleashing a pandemic on the world, on the understanding that it could gain economic and political advantage during a crisis it knew about far in advance of its rivals. 

All in all, it is far easier to blame China (and the Wuhan Institute of Virology) than to admit that western governments have been deskilled. The United States and the United Kingdom in particular have lost all competence after decades spent “rolling back the state” and handing over major public responsibilities like health and hygiene to the profit-seeking private sector.