CHINA’S ROLE IN PANDEMIC IS NOT GOING AWAY!
I try to avoid being duped by conspiracies theories. When I read about a cabal of paedophiles in the basement of a Washington pizzeria, I switch off. When Donald J Trump was quick to say that COVID-19 was made in China, I knew better. I always try to keep objectively to the facts: convinced I can spot the lunatic fringe at their zany work from a mile off.
By Dr Terry Maguire
B
ut sometimes, somehow, a weird story cannot be easily dismissed. Things just don’t seem right. Facts don’t add up, are
hidden or get spun. The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic - and the real role of China - are proving to be one of those irritating conspiracy theories that just won’t go away.
The official position - sternly supported and promoted by Chinese authorities - is that the SARs-CoV-2 virus originated in a bat, which then infected another mammal, possibly a pangolin, and that animal then infected humans. The initial Chinese investigation, after much hesitancy in accepting that a virulent virus was even on the loose, focused on a ‘wet’ food market in Wuhan as the likely origin: the coronavirus version of Ground Zero. We are led to believe that this novel virus just simply mutated out of the flesh of a piece of exotic meat and jumped into humans. But then, this is how new viruses appear.
Just as with Jon Snow’s Broad Street pump, the ‘wet’ market was identified as the likely reservoir, and, just as Snow did with the handle of the Broad Street pump, the market was removed, closed down and a ban placed on the sale of exotic species.
COVID-19, however, is no water-borne disease. Rather, it is airborne, and, once it was out of its box, it moved quickly through a naïve population.
The rest, as they say, is history.
This official narrative has precedence. In 2002, the SARs epidemic emerged out of a similar wet market to infect, globally, more than 8,000 people and kill 774. Then came MERs, which appeared in the Middle East.
Neither SARs, which originated in bats before moving to masked palm civets, nor MERs, which originated in bats before moving into camels, were airborne viruses, which was a delightful blessing, given that they had pretty impressive mortality rates.
In the opening section of their book, Failures of State, Sunday Times journalists Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott, speculate about the involvement of Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is housed in a building that is a mere 278 metres from the entrance to the Wuhan wet
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