One issue is, if (as some people suggest) this is a bioweapon that managed to escape quarentine, why they chose not to use some other retrovirus that had a higher rate of spread and lethality? To make it resemble previous outbreaks in China more closely? Would people seriously even care to go to that level of detail, given how easily people swallow B.S. from the mainstream media?

Of course there are people who are implicating the Chinese government in spreading the disease purely by censorship and mismanagement, and others who say it is a machivellian move to reduce their population or to control food (as a previous post said). I'm not sure I go by what they say though. We have been expecting plague as a manifestation of the cosmic reaction against human evil for a long time. If we go with other diseases purported to be manifestations of this same cosmic reaction it seems to be at that same level (eg Spanish Flu is 2.6, and the Black Death in Europe was estimated in this paper to be between 1.4 to 1.9, although to me that seems to be strangely low).
 
Sorry if this has already been posted, there is so much to read in this thread, that I only read some of it.

In this article, doctors in Thailand have treated several patients with flu and HIV medications, that improved their conditions.

 
Here is an interesting article about how this situation causes fear, the different aspects of fear, and how fear negatively affects us.


The Coronavirus - Containing Pandemic Fear

Excerpt:

On Fear
Fear is a messed up and dangerous thing. It shuts down the processes of the mind that make rational and compassionate thinking possible, triggering people to do the craziest, riskiest and most unstable and unreasonable things imaginable. This is why fear is the cheapest and quickest way to influence and control people, and why tyrants must always maintain a monopoly on violence. If you want someone to do your bidding, just frighten them into thinking they have no other choice. It works every time.
 
From African swine fever - to Coronavirus - to Bird Flu culling chickens. What's next, some kind of virus in the water supply?

China reports bird flu outbreak in Hunan province
China reports bird flu outbreak in Hunan province

‎February‎ ‎01‎, ‎2020‎ - As if health officials in China don't have enough on their hands with a spreading coronavirus, now officials announced an outbreak of bird flu.

China's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs announced Saturday an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 bird flu at a farm in the southern province of Hunan.

The virus was discovered on a farm with nearly 8,000 chickens - more than half of them have already died because of the outbreak.

China is not alone in trying to tamp down the spread of this virus.

Earlier this week authorities in India started culling chickens and destroying eggs to contain the bird flu virus. And a different strain - the H5N8 virus - has spread throughout eastern Europe in recent weeks.

A bird flu outbreak in China back in 2013 ended up costing $6.5 billion in economic losses, according to U.N. experts.

Zero Hedge, a financial market website was banned from Twitter. The claim - "Zero Hedge had released the personal information of a scientist from Wuhan in an article that made allegations about coronavirus having been concocted “as a bioweapon.” The article was titled “Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?”

Financial market website Zero Hedge knocked off Twitter over coronavirus story
Twitter Inc has banned financial market website Zero Hedge from the social media platform after it published an article linking a Chinese scientist to the outbreak of the fast-spreading coronavirus last week.Zero Hedge said it received a notification from Twitter on Friday, accusing it of violating Twitter's "rules against abuse and harassment."

Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?
Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?
 
This article is pulling on the threads of the Canada Connection.
I posted the original articles on the China thread a while ago #83


"The Canadian Lab
Coronavirus arrived at Canada’s NML Winnipeg facility on May 4, 2013 from the Dutch lab. The Canadian lab grew up stocks of the virus and used it to assess diagnostic tests being used in Canada. Winnipeg scientists worked to see which animal species can be infected with the new virus.Research was done in conjunction with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s national lab, the National Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases which is housed in the same complex as the National Microbiology Laboratory.

NML has a long history of offering comprehensive testing services for coronaviruses. It isolated and provided the first genome sequence of the SARS coronavirus and identified another coronavirus NL63 in 2004.
This Winnipeg based Canadian lab was targeted by Chinese agents in what could be termed as Biological Espionage.

Chinese Biological Espionage
In March 2019, in mysterious event a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML ended up in China. The event caused a major scandal with Bio-warfare experts questioning why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China. Scientists from NML said the highly lethal viruses were a potential bio-weapon.
Following investigation, the incident was traced to Chinese agents working at NML. Four months later in July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory (NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc.



Xiangguo Qiu – The Chinese Bio-Warfare Agent
The NML scientist who was escorted out of the Canadian lab along with her husband, another biologist, and members of her research team is believed to be a Chinese Bio-Warfare agent Xiangguo Qiu. Qiu was the head of the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies Section in the Special Pathogens Program at Canada’s NML.
Xiangguo Qiu is an outstanding Chinese scientist born in Tianjin. She primarily received her medical doctor degree from Hebei Medical University in China in 1985 and came to Canada for graduate studies in 1996. Later on, she was affiliated with the Institute of Cell Biology and the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, not engaged with studying pathogens.
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese Biological Warfare Agent working at the National Microbiology Laboratory, Canada
But a shift took place, somehow. Since 2006, she has been studying powerful viruses in Canada’s NML. The viruses shipped from the NML to China were studied by her in 2014, for instance (together with the viruses Machupo, Junin, Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever and Hendra).
Infiltrating the Canadian Lab
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu is married to another Chinese scientist – Dr. Keding Cheng, also affiliated with the NML, specifically the “Science and Technology Core”. Dr. Cheng is primarily a bacteriologist who shifted to virology. The couple is responsible for infiltrating Canada’s NML with many Chinese agents as students from a range of Chinese scientific facilities directly tied to China’s Biological Warfare Program, namely:
  1. Institute of Military Veterinary, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Changchun
  2. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Chengdu Military Region
  3. Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hubei
  4. Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
Sources say Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng were escorted from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg on July 5, 2019. Since then, the University of Manitoba has ended their appointments, reassigned her graduate students, and cautioned staff, students and faculty about traveling to China. (Governor General’s Innovation Awards)
All of the above four mentioned Chinese Biological Warfare facilities collaborated with Dr. Xiangguo Qiu within the context of Ebola virus, the Institute of Military Veterinary joined a study on the Rift Valley fever virus too, while the Institute of Microbiology joined a study on Marburg virus. Noticeably, the drug used in the latter study – Favipiravir – has been earlier tested successfully by the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences, with the designation JK-05 (originally a Japanese patent registered in China already in 2006), against Ebola and additional viruses.
However, the studies by Dr. Qiu are considerably more advanced and apparently vital for the Chinese biological weapons development in case Coronavirus, Ebola, Nipah, Marburg or Rift Valley fever viruses are included therein.
The Canadian investigation is ongoing and questions remain whether previous shipments to China of other viruses or other essential preparations, took place from 2006 to 2018, one way or another.
Dr. Gary Kobinger, former chief of special pathogens (right), and Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, research scientist (second from right) met with Dr. Kent Brantly and Dr. Linda Mobula, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the physician who administered ZMapp to Brantly in Liberia when he was infected with Ebola during the 2014-16 outbreak. (Submitted by Health Canada)
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu also collaborated in 2018 with three scientists from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Maryland, studying post-exposure immunotherapy for two Ebola viruses and Marburg virus in monkeys; a study supported by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
The Wuhan Coronavirus
Dr. Xiangguo Qiu made at least five trips over the school year 2017-18 to the above mentioned Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which was certified for BSL4 in January 2017. Moreover, in August 2017, the National Health Commission of China approved research activities involving Ebola, Nipah, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses at the Wuhan facility.
Coincidentally, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is located only 20 miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market which is the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak dubbed the Wuhan Coronavirus.
The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is located just about 20 miles away from the Huanan Seafood Market, the epicenter of Coronavirus outbreak
The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is housed at the Chinese military facility Wuhan Institute of Virology linked to China’s Biological Warfare Program. It was the first ever lab in the country designed to meet biosafety-level-4 (BSL-4) standards – the highest biohazard level, meaning that it would be qualified to handle the most dangerous pathogens.
In January 2018, the lab was operational ‘for global experiments on BSL-4 pathogens,’ wrote Guizhen Wu in the journal Biosafety and Health. ‘After a laboratory leak incident of SARS in 2004, the former Ministry of Health of China initiated the construction of preservation laboratories for high-level pathogens such as SARS, coronavirus, and pandemic influenza virus,’ wrote Guizhen Wu.
Coronavirus Bioweapon
The Wuhan institute has studied coronaviruses in the past, including the strain that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, H5N1 influenza virus, Japanese encephalitis, and dengue. Researchers at the institute also studied the germ that causes anthrax – a biological agent once developed in Russia.
“Coronaviruses (particularly SARS) have been studied in the institute and are probably held therein,” said Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biowarfare. He said. “SARS is included within the Chinese BW program, at large, and is dealt with in several pertinent facilities.”
James Giordano, a neurology professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow in Biowarfare at the U.S. Special Operations Command, said China’s growing investment in bio-science, looser ethics around gene-editing and other cutting-edge technology and integration between government and academia raise the spectre of such pathogens being weaponized.


 
Did Canada's Chinese couple really "smuggle" the precursor for the Coronavirus to Chinese labs? Or was it just business as usual between biowarfare labs globally? It is convenient to put all the blame on Chinese "agents" and say it is totally evil China's fault. Maybe many in the Western world don't mind if China wants to do some testing for them.

I see these events more as "precursors" for the bigger cosmic ones. If one doesn't see the Wave in progress maybe it requires looking a little closer or taking a giant step back for a better view.

Session 4 April 2015:
Q: (L) Okay, that principle of scale was basically that when a quantum wave collapse occurs at the atomic scale, it's like nearly instantaneous because of the smallness of the system.

(Pierre) Macro scale takes more time.

(L) Yes. A wave or a phase transition at the macrocosmic scale would take place over a period of time. So, that reminds me of the session back I think it was in 1995, because I just recently re-read it, and it was about the dying off of the frogs. We were talking about frogs dying off because somebody had reported that frogs were disappearing. We asked about this, and the answer was along the lines that that was a precursor or an effect of the Wave. In other words, what we're seeing from our perspective are incremental events that, in a larger perspective, would be more or less instantaneous.

A: Yes.

Q: (L) Is that the principle of scale we're talking about here?

A: Yes. And those who do not realize this will "go under".

Q: (L) So somebody's who's waiting for a specific date for some kind of big flash to happen and suddenly they're gonna go from one world into another, they're simply not grasping the cosmic scale of thing?

A: Exactly! We once said that it was a grand example of cosmic "Pomp and Circumstance". You simply do not have the full perspective!


Q: (L) So that means that we are talking about changes on such a huge scale that our perspective is that of...

(Perceval) Here's an example. They said it's a creative cosmic process, so it's basically like a giant cosmic rototiller coming through the universe and turning over the soil and spreading fertilizer for new growth to maintain the universe like a good gardener. We're like one little tiny grain.

(Chu) We're like the worms who see the rototiller approaching for hours. [laughter]

(L) We're a microbe in a hundred thousand acre farm.

(Pierre) And we feel the vibrations of the coming rototiller for our whole lives, and just now, the rototiller is coming closer.

(Galatea) And some of you are gonna stick to the rototiller blades and get blasted up into space!

(L) Anything further on that?

A: For some things may be more dramatic than others.

Q: (Galatea) Meaning what? More dramatic how?

A: Depending on karmic "weight".


Q: (Pierre) Didn't in one session the C's describe the Wave process as what is called in the scriptures as the One Thousand Year period?

(L) No, I don't think so.

(Galatea) Are you saying that for some people this transition will be painful?

A: Yes


(L) I think they said that after the Wave there would be a 1000 year period as 3D transition into 4D.

A: Yes

Q: (L) So in other words, in a sense that is kind of like a 1000 year process of the Wave. The creation of a totally new reality obviously, in cosmic terms, takes that strange process that doesn't exist called time to manifest. But obviously, they are now talking about the breaking down process, the chaos.

A: Yes. Now you begin to see what "time" really is: cosmic processes of almost infinite duration. But do not be complacent because some of these processes can be rather "quick" and devastating from your perspective.
 
A pertinent development:
Pentagon approves using military bases to quarantine 1,000
February 1, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Saturday approved a request from the Department of Health and Human Services for the possible use of military facilities to accommodate 1,000 people who may have to be quarantined upon arrival from overseas due to a new virus.

A Defense Department statement said HHS officials requested the use of several facilities capable of housing at least 250 people in individual rooms through Feb. 29. HHS would be responsible for all care, transportation and security of the evacuees, according to the statement.

The viral outbreak began in China, where the death toll rose to 259 on Saturday. More than 11,900 people have been infected with the coronavirus globally, the vast majority of them on the Chinese mainland.

An order signed Friday by President Donald Trump temporarily bars entry to foreign nationals who have traveled to China within the last 14 days, with the exception of immediate family of U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

Americans returning from China will be allowed into the country, but will face screening at select ports of entry and be required to undertake 14 days of self-screening to ensure they don’t pose a health risk.

Those returning from Hubei province, the center of the outbreak, will be subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine.

The installations selected by the Defense Department are the 168th Regiment, Regional Training Institute, Fort Carson, Colorado; Travis Air Force Base, California; Lackland Air Force Base, Texas; Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California.

Nearly 200 Americans already are quarantined at a military base in Southern California after being evacuated from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province.

None of the Americans being housed at the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside has shown signs of illness, but it can take up to two weeks for someone who is infected to get sick.

Beginning Sunday, the U.S. will also begin funneling all flights to the U.S. from China to seven major airports where passengers can be screened for illness.

 
This article is pulling on the threads of the Canada Connection.

There are many ways to muddy the waters on this whole affair, yet read what you had there and noted it was a level-4 facility, as stated.

My first reaction was to dismiss the Dr. Qiu/Dr. Cheng (married) infiltration of this lab bit, being that this lab would have security for just this sort of thing, and Qui and Cheng would be on a short list, osit(thought). Anything is possible, though.

Curiously, also noted {edit: this} something happened at the same level-4 lab back in July 2019 as reported by CBC discussing the RCMP's (police) actions at the lab. Those actions don't name Qui or Cheng, and the article is closed to what it was all about. At first it says Health Canada sent the matter to the RCMP for this lab, and the article then states it was an 'administrative matter' or, a policy breach.

Well, the RCMP do not typically respond to administrative issues, so what was the reason? They don't really say. Yet sometimes one thing leads to another and this article reports another level-4 breach back in 2012 by one Konan Michel Yao, and Yao was caught with (get this) "22 vials of the substance in the trunk of his car when he tried to cross the border," and it was kind of well hidden.

Apparently, Yao was on his way to his new job at the National Institutes of Health (Biodefense Research Laboratory) in Bethesda, Md. when detained, and low and behold he only had "genetic material from the Ebola virus," so no big deal.

Seventeen days in jail and a $500.00 fine. They did not say if he was allowed to keep the Ebola material, yet perhaps NIH intervened or not.

I hear not wearing a seat belt can be close to a $500.00 fine these days, too, but whatever, it was 'only' genetic Ebola virus material, so nothing to see here.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-microbiology-lab-rcmp-investigation-1.5209670

Public Health Agency asked police to look into 'administrative matter' at Canada's only Level 4 virology lab
Karen Pauls · CBC News · Posted: Jul 12, 2019 11:42 AM CT | Last Updated: July 12, 2019

lab-workers.jpg

Workers at the National Microbiology Lab are seen in a 2017 file photo. The Winnipeg lab is the only Level 4 virology facility in Canada — meaning a lab equipped to work with the most serious and deadly human and animal diseases. (CBC)
Manitoba RCMP are investigating a possible policy breach at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg.

Few details have been made public, but an RCMP spokesperson confirms police received a referral from the Public Health Agency of Canada.

"Based on information received to date, the RCMP has assessed that there is no threat to public safety at this time," Robert Cyrenne said in an email to CBC News on Thursday.

"In order to maintain the integrity of the investigative process, we have no further comment at this time."

The Public Health Agency describes it as a policy breach and "administrative matter" and says the department is taking steps to "resolve it expeditiously."

The agency did not clarify when the incident occurred or specify what happened, but said it notified RCMP on May 24, 2019.

"There is no employee from the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) under arrest or confined to their home," Eric Morrissette, the health agency's chief of media relations, said from Ottawa.

"We can assure Canadians that there is no risk to the public and that the work of the NML continues in support of the health and safety of all Canadians. For privacy reasons, we will not provide further information on this matter."


the-canadian-science-centre-for-human-and-animal-health-located-in-winnipeg.jpg

That lab one of only a handful in North America capable of handling dangerous pathogens such as Ebola, HIV and anthrax. (Trevor Brine/CBC)

The National Microbiology Lab is the only Level 4 virology facility in Canada — meaning a lab equipped to work with the most serious and deadly human and animal diseases. That makes the Arlington Street lab one of only a handful in North America capable of handling pathogens requiring the highest level of containment, such as Ebola, HIV and anthrax.

The lab helped develop ZMapp. The cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies has proven to be one of the most successful treatments for Ebola, which killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa between 2014-2016.

This isn't the first time police have investigated an incident at the lab.

In 2009, a former researcher at the lab was convicted of trying to smuggle genetic material from the Ebola virus across the Manitoba-North Dakota border.

Konan Michel Yao had 22 vials of the substance in the trunk of his car when he tried to cross the border.

The vials were wrapped in aluminum foil inside a glove and packaged in a plastic bag, along with electrical wires.

Yao told officers he was taking the vials to his new job with the National Institutes of Health at the Biodefense Research Laboratory in Bethesda, Md., because he didn't want to start from scratch in his research.

Yao was sentenced to 17 days in jail, which he had already served, and fined $500.

The Winnipeg lab reviewed its biosecurity protocol after that incident.
 
Last edited:
Sorry, should have gone further with this from the sub link, and it was 2009 not 2012:

Apparently, Yao was on his way to his new job at the National Institutes of Health (Biodefense Research Laboratory) in Bethesda, Md.

Yao was "charged with smuggling merchandise, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 US," so he kind of got the minimum because he argued:

"In his affidavit, the 42-year-old researcher said he was hired by the Public Health Agency of Canada to work as a PhD fellow at the Winnipeg facility. Yao told officers he was working on a vaccine for the Ebola virus and HIV."

HIV, was that not similar gene sequencing with the China Coronavirus, or is that mistaken?

Luckily for Yao, a Canadian Dr. from the lab chimed in on Yao's defense saying:

"Dr. Frank Plummer, the scientific director of the Winnipeg lab, said the genetic material taken was not the full Ebola virus and does not pose a risk to the public."

Okay, some relief in that.

To finish this sorted affair:


Plummer said theft has never happened at the lab before. Researchers are reminded they cannot take any lab property without permission, and they sign documents asserting that they know the rules, he said.

The lab is now reviewing its biosecurity protocol.

No public health risk, Canadian health agency says


Lynn Jordheim, the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said Yao was not carrying the active viruses. Still, Jordheim said, the allegations against Yao are serious.

"You take it seriously when something like this happens, but this is not the scenario you fear where somebody would be bringing a biological agent across," Jordheim said.:lol:

A spokesman with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Minnesota office told CBC News on Wednesday that the agency was initially called in to investigate and monitor a terrorist threat, but the threat was assessed and ruled out.

The FBI said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be handling the investigation.

The Public Health Agency of Canada said there was never a public health risk, and insisted Yao did not have access to the highest-level pathogens and only worked with non-infectious material.

A spokesperson for the agency confirmed that the accused was a researcher who hadn't worked at the National Microbiology Lab since January.

Yao was born in the Ivory Coast. He studied at Laval University in Quebec and was briefly affiliated with the plant sciences department at the University of Manitoba.

A former supervisor described him as "a normal researcher."
 
A pertinent development:
Pentagon approves using military bases to quarantine 1,000

A hypothesis ... If I wanted a random selection of ethnic and non-ethnic specimens to test under strict military protocols by qualified lab technicians familiar with the development of lethal and non-lethal weapons, I would offer and provide the conditions needed for a sterile and controlled environment. Data collected would fall under Government and military supervision and not under a public entity (hospital, City and State).

Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than the coronavirus itself.

The Wuhan Virus Is Not a Lab-Made Bioweapon
The Wuhan Virus Is Not a Lab-Made Bioweapon

January 29, 2020 - The recent outbreak of a new and potentially deadly coronavirus in China has, unsurprisingly, kicked off a deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

As of Tuesday, there were more than 6,000 confirmed cases of the virus, with 132 people dead. The center of the epidemic, and still the location of around a third of the cases, is Wuhan, in the central province of Hubei. Other cases have rapidly sprung up worldwide—but the transmission of paranoia and inaccurate information has managed to keep pace.

There is still plenty unknown about the virus, but researchers say it shares similarities to Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—two infectious diseases that have emerged in recent decades but that have been managed. While concerns inside China are serious and travel restrictions have been imposed across much of the country, public health officials stress there is no need for panic, especially not in the West where the risk of transmission remains low.

That hasn’t stopped an outbreak of nonsense and conspiracy theories. On Sunday, the Washington Times — a paper with a distinct ideological bent published an article claiming that the virus’ outbreak could be linked to a military lab in Wuhan.

The article suggests a government-run lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, could have been researching military applications for the coronavirus and may have been the source of the outbreak.

The only basis for the claim is a quote from former Israeli intelligence officer Dany Shoham, who has expertise in biological warfare.

“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” Shoham told the Times.

While Shoham never backed up the claim made in the story that the outbreak stemmed from a biological weapon, other outlets nevertheless picked up the idea and ran with it.

The Texas radio station KPRC posted the story to its site, concluding “some intelligence experts believe the Chinese military’s biowarfare department may be responsible.” A speculation by a single former officer had become “intelligence experts.” The Toronto Sun columnist Candice Malcolm pumped the theory on her YouTube show, asking: “Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the origins of this deadly virus? Could it be linked to China’s biological warfare program?”

All this on the guesswork of one man—and it’s not the first time Shoham has pumped the tires on a theory without much merit. In 2017, he went on Radio Sputnik, a propaganda arm of the Russian government, to suggest the Islamic State had likely passed on chemical weapon capabilities to its sleeper cells in the West.

GreatGameIndia, a small conspiracy website— which, among other things, has reported that British intelligence was responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014—began publishing reports last week claiming that Canadian researchers had sold this strain of coronavirus to China.

The co-founder and editor of the website has also written extensively for the Centre for Research on Globalization, a Montreal-based site that has been identified by NATO as a peddler of Russian and Syrian propaganda.

The website pointed blame at Xiangguo Qiu, a former researcher with the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a government-run lab that has pioneered vaccines and treatments for various infectious diseases, including Ebola. While it’s true she was escorted from the lab last year by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, there does not appear to be a national security element to the incident. Charges have not been laid, and those familiar with the case say it is likely a matter of paperwork and protocol. Qiu, in fact, worked extensively with labs in China to create treatments for deadly and infectious diseases.

While the claims made on GreatGameIndia are demonstrably untrue—the supposed shipment of the coronavirus in 2018 was for, in fact, for the MERS strain, not the novel coronavirus currently seen in Wuhan—it nevertheless got picked up by fellow conspiracy site ZeroHedge, which has a massive following (about 670,000 Twitter followers and millions of visitors to its blog). Its post on the baseless theory has been shared more than 6,000 times on Facebook and tweeted by hundreds of accounts, including by Toronto Sun columnist Tarek Fatah. The claims have since spread to a network of other less-than-reputable sites.

David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said this coronavirus is definitely novel. And new viruses, especially those that move fast, can cause panic. Panic leads to people “casting about for conspiracy theories,” he said. But diseases that quickly mutate and infect humans are simply part of nature. “Welcome to emerging infectious diseases,” he told Foreign Policy.

And this bioweapon speculation isn’t exactly new. In 2003, during the SARS outbreak, the Jamestown Foundation think tank published an analysis suggesting “there are compelling reasons, however unsettling, to at least ask whether there might be any linkage between SARS and China’s biological warfare efforts.” That claim ultimately proved baseless.

The bioweapon fears aren’t the only ones out there. BuzzFeed News has already put together a list of 19 myths, fake images, and total falsehoods relating to the coronavirus outbreak.

Prepper websites, targeting those who obsessively prepare for the apocalypse and other widespread emergencies, have exploded with news of the outbreak, warning that the outbreak could rival that of the Spanish flu. Infowars, the conspiracy site run by Alex Jones that has previously received the endorsement of U.S. President Donald Trump, has also been quick to spread lies and invented numbers about the outbreak.

On Reddit, multiple channels devoted to the coronavirus outbreak have popped up, and they have quickly become hubs for panic and half-baked concern.

Users on the coronavirus subreddit have been posting details of flights originating from China and have been encouraging others to stockpile goods. One user began creating graphs modeling the outbreak in exponential terms and concluding that the “real” death toll (based on social media) is in fact over 8,000. The user’s graphs, which have begun spreading on social media, assert there will be 11.5 million cases of the coronavirus by next month, with over 800,000 dead.

“This is terrifying,” Fisman acknowledged. “But exponential growth is what happens if you leave these processes alone and don’t do anything about them.”

It’s called Farr’s Law, named for a famed British epidemiologist. It holds that, as human behavior changes in the midst of a disease outbreak and health agencies take action, transmissions level off and then decline. While it’s been misapplied in the past, it is a good predictor of how outbreaks can be stopped.

Looking at the graph in question, Fisman said it’s irresponsible to be spreading that sort of misinformation. “Curves don’t look like this. Because we do things about them.”

While the coronavirus is undoubtedly spreading fast, it is worth putting the numbers in context.

There have been nearly 100,000 cases of influenza A and B, which cause the flu, in the United States since the flu season began in late September 2019—including 54 deaths of children.

It’s still not clear how this outbreak of the coronavirus compares to SARS and MERS, but both outbreaks provide some frame of reference. The SARS outbreak of November 2002, which continued until the following July, resulted in more than 8,000 cases and about 775 deaths in more than two dozen countries—the response to that outbreak was marred by a late response and Beijing’s effort to control information to hide the extent of the virus’ reach. MERS, meanwhile, was first discovered in the Persian Gulf in 2012 and since then has seen sporadic clusters of cases. Over the past eight years, there have been nearly 2,500 confirmed cases and more than 850 deaths spread out over more than two dozen countries.

For SARS, the R0 value—a number that estimates how many others each infected person could pass the virus onto—sat somewhere between 2 and 5. For the new coronavirus, the R0 value appears to be similar, but lower, Nancy Messonnier, the director of U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, said in a media briefing Monday. “Most articles have had interpretation that the R0 is somewhere 1.5 and 3,” Messonnier said.

To just look at the R0 value can be troubling, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story.

R_0 estimates for #SARS are 2 to 5, whereas they’re only about 1.3 on average for seasonal #flu. The latter causes millions of cases a year whereas the former didn’t even cause [10,000],” Maia Majumder, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Computational Health Informatics Program, tweeted Saturday.

Speaking to Foreign Policy, Majumder said that just because the coronavirus has had an R0 value of, say, 2 in China before the public was alerted to its existence doesn’t mean it will continue to have that value. “It shouldn’t be treated as a constant of nature; it varies considerably from place to place because of social practices, environmental differences, and so on,” she said.

It does appear that the virus has spread faster than originally thought. Researchers in Hong Kong estimate that the real number of infections could be over 40,000 in Wuhan alone. Fisman says that’s “the right order of magnitude” (he personally thinks the actual number of cases is closer to 15,000) but notes there’s another side to that.

“If we’re missing a whole bunch of cases … well that means your cumulative case fatality is too high,” Fisman said. In other words: If the undiagnosed cases are so mild that infected people don’t know they’re infected, it does mean the scope of the outbreak is wider, but that it is less lethal than the confirmed case count would suggest. (There are real concerns that the dead are being undercounted, but not on the scale that some conspiracy theorists, who have made claims of thousands dead, have suggested without proof.)

Part of the basis for suggesting that the infected number may be multiples higher than originally thought stems from speculation that the virus can transmit even when those infected are asymptomatic, or that those infected are contagious for longer than normal. That comes from statements from the Chinese health authority, which indicated the virus has gotten more powerful. Chinese Health Minister Ma Xiaowei said the incubation period could be as long as 14 days. Fisman said the research to date doesn’t support that claim, and he said the incubation period looks more like that of SARS, at around six days. He suggested that, as the virus can be mild in some infected people, they may not even know they’re symptomatic—children, for example, may run around and play, oblivious to their runny nose.

The CDC, similarly, says there is no evidence to support the idea that asymptomatic people are contagious.

There are fears that the paranoia and panic could push some to profile all Asians as being vectors of disease.

“What’s very concerning to me … is how easily those rumors can lead to inappropriate discrimination against people,
and we need to take all those rumors with a grain of salt and recognize that they are just that: rumors,” British Columbia Health Officer Bonnie Henry told reporters on Tuesday, in announcing her province’s first case.

Discrimination is already occurring in China, where citizens with registration cards from Hubei are being forcibly quarantined or refused entry into public spaces or transportation—even if they haven’t been home in months or years. As the Trump administration mulls possible travel bans and neighboring countries begin to close their borders, that paranoia may spread.

The U.S.'s hype in travel restrictions to China and exaggerated fear mongering during China's Lunar New Year holiday has forced China to openly condemn their actions. The Philippine's President Duterte has asked citizens to stop any anti-Chinese xenophobia.

China accuses U.S. of scaremongering over coronavirus
Beijing on Monday accused the United States of spreading fear over a coronavirus outbreak by pulling nationals out and restricting travel instead of offering significant aid.

U.S. whipping up panic over virus, China says, as Pakistan resumes flights
China accused the United States on Monday of whipping up panic over a fast-spreading coronavirus with travel restrictions and evacuations as Chinese stocks plunged on the first day back from the extended Lunar New Year holiday.

Philippines' Duterte says xenophobia against Chinese must stop
President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday urged Philippine citizens to stop stirring up anti-Chinese xenophobia related to the outbreak of a coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China, in December and has since killed more than 300 and infected more than 17,000.
 
Back
Top Bottom