None Dare Call It 'Germ Warfare'

    Just over a century ago an airborne plague called the Spanish Flu swept over the world, infecting at least 500 million people and killing at least 50 million before it burned itself out in 1920.  At the time nobody knew just what it was, where it came from, or how to deal with it.  Then as now the only remotely-effective defense the experts could think of was to wear face-masks in public, and a lot of people objected to that.  Nobody had any idea how to create a vaccine for it.  Nobody considered closing schools or shutting down the economy.  Not until 1991, with the benefits of modern medical knowledge, was the source of the "Spanish Flu" identified as a variant of the H1N1-A virus -- definitely a member of the Corona virus family -- while biologists were isolating  H1N1 Swine Flu in mainland China.  The Chinese government then insisted that it had been brought into China via pigs imported from North America.  This did not prevent the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 Swine Flu in China.

    In fact, with the exception of Polio, Ebola and AIDS,  all of the major viral plagues of the 20th century -- including SARS, MERS, H1N5, H1N1, Covid-19 -- can be traced to the Corona virus family, which is permanently entrenched in China.  It's also notable that over the last 50 years China has made great efforts to capture most of the world's medical-supply industry.  

    The present pandemic, despite odd accusations from the Chinese government, originated in the city of Wuhan, in China.  Wuhan is a sizable city, which supports the University of Wuhan, which maintains the Wuhan Medical College, which administers the Virology Institute of Wuhan.  The official story is that the virus traveled from infected bats in the city's live-animal market to the rest of the city.  The story from various doctors who have defected from China is that the virus "escaped" from the Wuhan Virology Institute to the live-animal market and from there to the rest of the city.  What we do know is that as far back as December 2019 the Chinese government banned travel from Wuhan to the rest of China -- but not from Wuhan to the rest of the world.  This allowed China to celebrate its lucrative New Year holiday season without being interrupted by the epidemic.   

     By January of 2020 the virus had spread to the rest of the world, and no quarantine orders could keep it contained.  By now it's become clear that China severely "mishandled" the outbreak -- by allowing the virus to escape in the first place, by allowing widespread travel once the New Year celebrations were over, by telling the WHO initially that there was no danger of human-to-human transmission, by withholding information about the genetic structure of the virus (necessary for constructing vaccines), and initially withholding sales of medical supplies to the rest of the world.  It's also obvious how political factions have "weaponized" reactions to the virus -- particularly in the US, where Democrat officials have used lockdowns to cripple the US economy, therefore wrecking the major victory of Trump's administration.  Since Trump has been a serious opponent of China's economic warfare policies, getting him out of office could only serve China's interests.

    Since this is not the first time that various forms of Corona virus have come out of China in the past 40 years, there's some reason to wonder whether such "escapes" are accidental or not.  

    For most other countries, the chief objection to deliberately spreading plague to one's political enemies -- in other words, "germ warfare" -- is that the plague will inevitably spread to one's own population.  China is one of perhaps two countries on Earth, the other being India, which would have no problem with that.  China has the biggest population in the world -- one and a half billion people -- while India has one and a third billion.  Both countries have been trying, for generations, to cut their excessive populations down -- sometimes resorting to draconian methods that would appall the rest of the world.  Remember that the Spanish Flu killed roughly one-tenth of the people it infected, and the other Corona viruses have lethality rates much lower than that.  The government of China would not grieve if it lost a million, or ten million, or a hundred million, or even half a billion of its own people;  after all, it would still have a billion more to obey its edicts and pay its taxes.  It would certainly feel no pain if the rest of the world lost half a billion people, or more.  

    So far, the only downside to the Chinese government for allowing the Covid-19 pandemic to spread has been "loss of face" -- i.e. embarrassment -- in front of the rest of the world, and one lawsuit filed in the UN's world court by, IIRC, the governor of Missouri for "reckless endangerment".  The upside has been the weakening of its assorted enemies, economically and politically.  Motive alone is not sufficient for conviction, and there's no evidence that the Wuhan Virology Institute actually did let loose the Covid-19 virus deliberately, but there's certainly motive for it not to be too careful about its safety and containment protocols -- and history to suggest that it hasn't been too careful in the past.  Nobody is saying the words "germ warfare" in public, but I suspect that a lot of health officials and politicians in the world are thinking them.

--Leslie <;)))>< Fish