I generally scoff at conspiracy theories – and there have been no shortage of them as much of the globe succumbs to the Chinese virus panic. Some are just weird, others the usual paranoid stuff, but…damn me if there isn’t plenty to hang a foil hat on.
For instance, as YouTuber laowhy86 recently showed, just a month before the virus broke out, a virology lab at the epicentre was recruiting people to study coronavirus in bats.
Then there are incidents like this:
In late November 2018, just over a year before the first coronavirus case was identified in Wuhan, China, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at Detroit Metro Airport stopped a Chinese biologist with three vials labeled “Antibodies” in his luggage.
[…]After examining the vials, however, customs agents came to an alarming conclusion.
“Inspection of the writing on the vials and the stated recipient led inspection personnel to believe the materials contained within the vials may be viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials,” says an unclassified FBI tactical intelligence report obtained by Yahoo News.
Well, so what? That was a year ago, wasn’t it?
The FBI concluded that the incident, and two other cases cited in the report, were part of an alarming pattern.
[…]Raina MacIntyre, a professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said the FBI appears to be concerned with dual-use research that would be used for bioterrorism.
Of course, given the choice of a conspiracy or a stuff-up, you can almost always bet on the stuff-up.
Concerns about Chinese biosafety are not new. For example, the SARS outbreak in 2003 was followed by several incidents of infections caused by laboratory accidents, including eight cases that resulted from mishandling at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing.
“There have been cases in the past where a variant of some kind of flu pandemic had escaped from a laboratory because of mismanagement,” said Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
It doesn’t help, though, that the stuff-ups are abetted by the useful idiots of an authoritarian regime.
Several recent high-profile Justice Department cases involving the export of sensitive technology have involved Chinese scientists, or persons with alleged ties to the Chinese government.
Most prominently, the Justice Department in January announced charges against Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, for concealing ties to the Chinese government.
Too many Western academics have been firmly in China’s pocket for years, greedily grasping for Beijing’s rivers of gold pouring into “Confucius Centres” in Western universities. Not that it took much for China to buy its way into academic beds, given academia’s longstanding fondness for leftist authoritarianism.
Naturally, of course, leftist academics are quick to draw the Racism Card.
But the FBI’s focus on China and Chinese scientists is also raising concerns among some academics, who fear it smacks of profiling. “I am concerned that the current trend in national security is toward profiling against people of Chinese descent,” said Nicholas Evans, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who specializes in medical ethics. “That’s not only racist, it’s bad practice. FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement attempts at profiling have very often been harmful without making us any safer.”
Sure. Just like, when you’re looking for a terrorist, just ignore the swivel-eyed beardy yelling “Allahu ackbar”, and frisk old ladies in wheelchairs instead.
I’m yet to be anywhere near convinced that this is all some sort of cunning biological warfare plan by the Chinese communists, but, let’s face it: how different would things have turned out, if it was? While the Chinese virus pandemic is almost certainly the result of a stuff-up – be it just the unconscionable Chinese wet markets or laboratory mismanagement – Beijing and its globalist bootlickers are happily exploiting the crisis and Western countries are being turned into Stasi states overnight.
When even David Icke isn’t sounding completely loony, you know we’re living in interesting times.
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