02 June 2021
It must be the most bizarre idea which over the days and months, got into textured layering and nuance that we are now witness to what can be called the acknowledging of the plausible…The origin of this SARS CoV2 has been such an humdinger!
In a normal course of our human experience, we could have seen the Spanish Flu, our last experience with a flu virus that ravaged the earth as the immediate precedence. For the name itself reveals how the origins of that one was sought to be initially deflected and denied, and no guesses here, for it was the USA that obfuscated the origins of the last viral devastation to visit humanity, the exact charge that now USA has joined others in levelling against China with President Biden ordering his Intelligence officials with a 90 day window to close this argument in a decisive way…Did the Coronavirus emerge from Wuhan’s lab?
Before we quite go there, let us be clear, that this SARS CoV2 is definitely not a WMD. For China, the order of this probe led to her official spokesperson to contrast it with the last time Pentagon hunted for something and informed the world, the ‘WMDs of Saddam Hussein’ which led eventually to a wild goose chase and the totally unnecessary war in the MiddleEast, a war that USA could have easily fought against Pakistan and cleaned up the Taliban once and for all. Instead the Pentagon’s famed intelligence made us all bark the wrong tree, shattered the international reputation of General Colin Powell as a person and interlocutor, and US went into a rabbit hole that ended finally when the IG released a damning report and now they are pulling out leaving behind a mess in Afghanistan. I would go so far as to say, a US undistracted from Iraq would have focused much earlier on China, not having a changed Chinese posture and a global pandemic with its supply chain shocks to nudge it to reboot her strategic stakes.
So from where this comes, the Chinese have a point. Why would they now trust Biden’s Intelligence Report? Yet, looking at how the 46th POTUS has literally placed his predecessors on the cross hairs as he deftly unknots one issue after another open, I am sanguine that Biden will leave this clearly settled once and for all. To ensure that his own elites and analysts do not waste their energies on another wild goose chase. So Biden’s unstated aim is simple: To disprove all the controversies and conspiracy theories that now surround the SARS CoV2 origin story.
In an ideal world of science, this pandemic should have had several false starts, when from some host to intermediary host to humans that bug must have jumped and fallen back, improving its code, tempering its spike protein sequences to come up eventually as the now recognised genomic sequence of the Wuhan strain. In nature, such a thing could have happened in ideal settings where host-intermediary-human were in close proximity over several months, where the virus passing through each living organism as bat-pangolin-human emerged with the perfect strand of RNA that became SARS CoV2. What we don’t have is record from Chinese of these incidences of zoonotic infections, like how just the other day they announced a H10N3 in a 41 year old Male resident of Zhenjiang who was hospitalised on 28 April 2021, diagnosed as a H10N3 case of influenza of avian origin on 28 May 2021 and discharged a few days later. If this is not one gap, there are several others, for here the human zoonotic phase would have involved several such cross infections, before what epidemiologists call ‘case zero’, where the first human would have received the perfected viral strain which then jumped from human to another human.
There is equally the possibility that Dr Shi Zhengli, the top virologist who heads the Centre for Emerging Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is aware of certain facts which she has been economical about. We know the WHO initially advised wrongly about human to human transmission after the Wuhan outbreak became an International Outbreak of concern before being officially declared as a pandemic. We also know initially many scientists globally thought that the virus spread through only droplets, that the experience from several cruise liners was to suggest that it was a surface contaminant too. We know now that aerosol happens, surface contaminant is not a route for infection actually.( Dr Goldman a microbiologist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School found that SARS CoV2 rarely passed on that way for various reasons and his findings were published in Lancet Infectious Diseases in July 2020!) Yet, no real effort has been made to unearth the reasons why the Chinese and the WHO allowed the world to be misled initially.
We know that China tried to deny its own Wuhan medical fraternity about this novel coronavirus, including how it ill treated the ophthalmologist who opened the eyes of the world through Chinese social media to the true horrors of this pandemic- Dr Li Wenliang! So two things make China take a bad place and convert it into a swamp- its initial denial about this now becoming a pandemic possibility and its treatment of its own homegrown medical professionals who rang warning bells in Wuhan about this. Dr Shi maintained her Sphinx like stance, unwilling to engage with her scientific community peers even. When Wuhan had the laboratory infrastructure, when Wuhan was the place where case zero and the epidemic outbreak happened, why did a Virology Centre from Shanghai code the genome of the novel coronavirus (Fudan University)? So from these early responses of the Chinese, we could clearly see that Chinese had more to conceal than to reveal. So could this actually be a coronavirus their Wuhan lab was dabbling with for scientific research purposes, one that accidentally obtained a human host? A Laboratory scientist or group of scientists, who then became the group from where case zero emerged? Will China reveal Wuhan laboratory personnel’s health records? Will US be able to obtain it? For this would be the only way we can bury this ghost of it being a virus associated with a laboratory, one that emerged from serious lapses in a Bio Hazard Level 4 laboratory, where its human workers interacted with wild zoonotic viruses being studied that were bat in origin and due to proximity and leaks in protocols, the viruses were to treat their human handlers as intermediary and perfect themselves before latching on to one of them as human host? So did the coronavirus jump from Petri dish to human?
Why I wish to rule out the SARS CoV2 as a bio weapon is because it does not meet the basic qualities that scientists and military experts seek in a bio weapon. The main issue is how unpredictable this novel coronavirus has been. It has shown very selective evidence so far of being a ‘super spreader’, it needs certain conditions that are still being studied, which need to be met, for the virus to infect more than one person from one encounter with a host. For both outdoor and indoor events, the factors are the proverbial Swiss Cheese model where the holes more often than not, don’t match at all! That is one main reason why in all probability epidemiologists who favoured the natural herd immunity theory failed glaringly, because the virus appears to not run through populations the way it possibly could. That is also why, in actual ground situation, there are many unaffected by SARS CoV2 for whom this is just one big hoax, while the unfortunate few who suffered it will remain haunted by it equally! So suffice to say, no military general worth his salt will accept such a bio weapon, one that is uncontrolled in its behaviour, in its Infectivity, Virulence, its incubation period, transmissibility, stability and lethality. Just take the Indian variant studied called 1.617. This was weeks ago and now we see that it is 1.617.2 & 1.617.1 christened after Greek alphabet as delta and kappa respectively by WHO’s new nomenclature for variants of concern, after sensitivities arose over taking the place of origin of variants to refer to them. Technically 1.617 is the variant, the 1&2 are sub variants of this variant, but now notified as individually of equal concern with unique characteristics. The amounts of variants and the half a dozen concern causing ones in the past one year have shown what we can only ascribe as natural properties of RNA viruses, as they drift and shift with infections through natural pools of living organisms. While many pooh poohed Russian vaccine efforts for cats who appear to suffer SARS CoV2 from us humans though with no serious consequences, the probability of our cats becoming reservoirs and then recycling the virus from them to us cannot be ruled out, so I would not say the Russian efforts are a wild goose chase. It further reinforces the theory that our novel coronavirus is a natural one and not human engineered.
Without Case Zero, without health records from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology, without a epidemiological map of the outbreak in Wuhan I will never be absolutely sure that Chinese virologists had no role in this pandemic. I wish some how, that CCP Politburo itself understands why it is in China’s interests to part with all this information. Because this is not the last pandemic, with climate change on anvil, with clear challenges ahead, the chances of Chinese wet markets offering inter species jump for viruses as zoonotic or exotic to be the vehicle for a future pandemic is obvious. This scientific reality is why Wuhan got international support for its virology centre in the first place. It is also why Taiwanese scientists are always nervously monitoring new fevers or rashes across the mainland. Can President Biden squeeze from President Xi this clear evidence that we need? Can we allow China to suffer sanctions in microbiology and virology to enforce this, or will that boomerang by creating a bamboo curtain that will blind us completely to future outbreaks?
From Spanish Flu to SARS CoV2 Pandemic the biggest difference has clearly been science. Advances that made us model, predict, test, trace, treat and even without specific biologics and antiviral agents in our armoury, we have largely reduced the footprint of this bug in mortality and morbidity. If our politics had been more mature, I could have wagered that we would have saved more than 60% of the casualties we have now suffered. Our candidate vaccines for Covid19 are a clear success and going forward I am sure we will come up with treatments that would reverse the changes that make Covid Pneumonia or Covid end organ damage through blood clotting disturbances and other end arterial and tissue damages. And no matter how advanced we have emerged, we are nowhere near mimicking Mother Nature and conjuring such a predatory pathogen as SARS CoV2!
indiarubberman.com 