By Paul Dowling
“Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream;
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.”
– Gilbert & Sullivan, HMS Pinafore
Bat Soup
There is photographic and video evidence that the Chinese of Wuhan eat bat soup, and the grotesque images borne by photos and videos galore are now going viral to attest to the truth of this because everyone is being told by the media that eating bat soup is the cause of the coronavirus. Maybe this is true, but perhaps it is not. As Gilbert and Sullivan might say, “Things are seldom what they seem.”
Face Masks Are Sold Out in the US
The threat of a coronavirus pandemic has caused face masks and hand sanitizer to sell out across the United States. The coronavirus is reportedly akin to the avian flu, which would make sense for a contagion stemming from the eating of bats that has reportedly affected hundreds of people in China and elsewhere. There have been darker speculations of the coronavirus having been unleashed by the Chinese military. Some have said there are patents of the coronavirus. What of such speculations?
The New England Journal of Medicine on Coronavirus Spreading from Bats to People
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In 2012, The New England Journal of Medicine had this to say about coronavirus and the possible spread of such a pathogen to human beings: “A previously unknown coronavirus was isolated from the sputum of a 60-year-old man who presented with acute pneumonia and subsequent renal failure with a fatal outcome in Saudi Arabia. The virus (called HCoV-EMC) replicated readily in cell culture, producing cytopathic effects of rounding, detachment, and syncytium formation. The virus represents a novel betacoronavirus species. The closest known relatives are bat coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5. . . . The clinical picture was remarkably similar to that of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003 and reminds us that animal coronaviruses can cause severe disease in humans.” So, it does appear that there are forms of coronavirus that can spread from bats to humans.
A Coronavirus with Patent Number 10130701
The Pirbright Institute apparently holds a patent for a coronavirus (according to a search executed on the website of the US Patent and Trademark Offices for patent number 10130701). Here is what Justia Patents has published about this particular coronavirus: “The present invention provides a live, attenuated coronavirus comprising a variant replicase gene encoding polyproteins comprising a mutation in one or more of non-structural protein(s) (nsp)-10, nsp-14, nsp-15 or nsp-16. The coronavirus may be used as a vaccine for treating and/or preventing a disease, such as infectious bronchitis, in a subject.” So this particular variant of coronavirus, it would appear, has been engineered to act as a vaccine.
GreatGameIndia’s Ongoing Investigations Into Chinese Thievery of Canadian Biotech
One thing that is, without question, true of all viruses is that they mutate. So, if the coronavirus coming out of China were related to a coronavirus used for the purpose of engineering a vaccine, then there would already be a related vaccine already on file that might limit the spread of this Wuhan coronavirus. But how could such a virus find its way from the Americas to Wuhan? According to GreatGameIndia, “Last year a mysterious shipment was caught smuggling Coronavirus from Canada. It was traced to Chinese agents working at a Canadian lab.” A series of investigations by GreatGameIndia has exposed the weaponization of biotech by China. A July of 2019 report offers the following: “One of Canada’s top scientists says he’s surprised and dismayed an ‘administrative matter’ resulted in the sudden eviction of a prominent Chinese Canadian virologist, her biologist husband, and her students from Canada’s only level-4 lab in Winnipeg and prompted an RCMP investigation.” It would appear that the Canadians acquired the coronavirus in question back in 2013 when people in several countries were becoming infected due to the initial spread of the pathogen out of Saudi Arabia.
USA Today’s Prescribed Narrative About the Coronavirus
The USA Today headline “Bogus coronavirus conspiracy theory about patents, vaccine spreads on social media” is misleading, since there may be some truth behind the idea that the virus in China might be related to the Canadian virus that was being used to develop a coronavirus vaccine from the 2013 Saudi strain. Gary Kobinger, who is the Director of the Research Centre on Infectious Diseases, in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Laval University in Quebec, minimizes the significance of the biotech theft that occurred. However, if the matter is one of minor significance, then why is it that “[s]ources say Xiangguo Qiu, biologist Keding Cheng, and an unknown number of Qiu’s students were escorted from the National Microbiology Lab (NML) and their security access revoked on July 5”? USA Today continues its mischaracterization of all reporting connecting the coronavirus to patented virus samples from labs by claiming that “[n]umerous posts claim the virus has been patented – and some even suggest, incorrectly, that the virus was made in a lab and a vaccine already exists.” But USA Today never states how they know this is true. In actuality, these pronouncements are far too broad and should not be stated in such a way as to make readers believe that they are unerringly true. If a Chinese agent has stolen a variety of coronavirus from a Canadian laboratory, and if there are probably patented strains of coronavirus on file in the US Patent and Trademark Office, then there is more than a mere chance that USA Today has not done enough investigative work, before making such bold assertions.
Why Was a Coronavirus Pandemic Drill Being Held at Johns Hopkins in October 2019?
Michael Snyder has reported that “[j]ust over three months ago, a ‘high-level pandemic exercise’ entitled ‘Event 201’ was held in New York City. On October 18th the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in conjunction with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brought together ‘15 leaders of business, government, and public health’ to simulate a scenario in which a coronavirus pandemic was ravaging the planet. The current coronavirus outbreak that originated in China did not begin until December, and so at that time it was supposedly just a hypothetical exercise.”
The Center for Health Security website says this of the exercise: “In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global – a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences.” Apparently, there was good reason to hold such an event, but it does seem strange that this drill should be held only a month or so ahead of a coronavirus outbreak in China.
Johns Hopkins, one of the top medical schools in the United States, released this statement on January 24, 2020: “In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201 with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recently, the Center for Health Security has received questions about whether that pandemic exercise predicted the current novel coronavirus outbreak in China. To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people.”
It is, without a doubt, a very interesting coincidence that preparation for “Event 201” was held in late October of 2019. Could this be just a coincidence? Or was there possibly intelligence – or at least a healthy suspicion – that suggested the Chinese were planning to use the purloined Canadian coronavirus strain as a biological weapon?
True Journalism Describes, Rather Than Prescribes, Reality
Could the coronavirus have been accidentally released by the Chinese military upon their own unsuspecting populace? Is the current outbreak from the stolen Canadian strain? And if so, that begs the question as to why the Chinese were interested in this particular strain of coronavirus. What made it special enough to steal, in the first place? And why do mainstream narrative-controlled media outlets object to these kinds of questions? Such questions are indeed speculative, but the fact remains that legacy media sites – USA Today among them – have not earnestly tried to find the answers to these questions; the legacy media are choosing instead to accuse thinking people who ask such questions as “conspiracy theorists” in an effort to halt questioning along these lines. The truth is that USA Today and its ilk are being just as speculative in refusing to consider the lines of questioning heretofore put forward, but the difference is that their speculations that such questions are spurious are subjective. And their reports on the coronavirus thus far have been largely lacking, resorting too often to taking officials at their words and failing to provide much in the way of corroborative evidence to back those people whom they choose to quote.
John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Along with any theory, or hypothesis, comes a null-hypothesis that should also be considered and explored as a possibility. The problem with so much of what is being reported nowadays is that too much is simply presumed to be true, as long as it matches the preferred narrative prescriptions of what legacy-media narrators wish to be true. The true business of journalism, however, is not to prescribe narratives, but to describe reality based upon where the facts lead. Unfortunately, the facts that are currently being made available to the public bring more questions than answers to the minds of thinking people.
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Paul Dowling
Paul Dowling has written about the Constitution, as well as articles for American Thinker, Independent Sentinel, Godfather Politics, Eagle Rising, and Conservative Notions.
