07/03/2020
Four creepy coincidences in coronavirus outbreak
As health authorities scramble to stop the spread of the disease amid fears of a global pandemic, the coronavirus panic has generated a flood of misinformation, dubious claims and conspiracy theories online.
Many, such as the claim that coronavirus was “patented”, have been debunked by websites including Politifact, FactCheck and HealthFeedback – but there’s no denying several strange circumstances surrounding the outbreak.
The official death toll in China now stands at 132 with more than 6000 infected in the country, mainly in Hubei province where the virus is believed to have originated at a controversial seafood market that sold exotic animals.
There have now been five confirmed cases in Australia, and the virus has spread to more than a dozen other countries — the US, Japan, France, Germany, Canada, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Nepal, Singapore, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Here are four coronavirus coincidences to ponder over a bowl of bat soup:
Bats have been identified as the likely source of the virus.
Bats have been identified as the likely source of the virus.Source:Supplied
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WUHAN SCIENTISTS CREATE ‘HYBRID’ BAT CORONAVIRUSES, SPARKING SAFETY WARNINGS
In 2015, scientists in the US and China revealed they had created a “chimeric” virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, demonstrated that the SHC014 coronavirus – a different strain to the one at the centre of the current outbreak, known as 2019-nCoV – was capable of infecting human airway cells.
The news reignited debate around so-called “gain-of-function” research – essentially taking already dangerous pathogens and making them more dangerous. Experts question whether such research, which is no longer funded by the US Government, is worth the risk.
“If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris told Nature at the time. Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright agreed, telling the publication, “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”
Fuelling conspiracy theories is the fact that two of the paper’s co-authors, Xing-Yi Ge and Zhengli-Li Shi, were based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, 30km from the suspected epicentre of the outbreak at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
According to a former Israeli intelligence official, the Wuhan Institute of Virology – one of the only facilities in the world with a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) certification needed to handle the most deadly diseases – is actually part of a secret biological weapons program.
“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese (biological weapons), at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” Dany Shoham told the conservative Washington Times website.
Other experts have dismissed Mr Shoham’s claims as baseless fearmongering. Another way to look at it – the 2015 study correctly identified the risk of bat-borne coronaviruses spreading to humans that is now playing out.
RELATED: Mystery lab next to coronavirus epicentre
OUTBREAK COMES THREE MONTHS AFTER GLOBAL CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC SIMULATION
Late last year, experts from the Centre for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University teamed up with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for an exercise in New York dubbed “Event 201”.
The eight-hour panel brought together leaders in business, government and public health to play a team of presidential advisers modelling the response to a worldwide pandemic of – you guessed it – coronavirus.
The scenario began three months in with 500,000 cases globally. By the end of the simulation, a mock news broadcast described the carnage. “Twenty months into one of the worst pandemics the world’s ever known, there’s still no vaccine,” the newsreader says.
“The World Health Organisation estimates 150 million people have died, approximately 2 per cent of the global population. The US, along with the rest of the world, is in its worst economic depression in history. The Dow Jones is down 90 cent, GDP down 50 per cent, unemployment running at 20 per cent.”
Speaking to the website Contagion Live at the time, Johns Hopkins scientist Eric Toner said the exercises were “primarily educational tools”. “One of the things we try to demonstrate through these exercises are economic and societal consequences, as well as the public health consequences, of a severe pandemic,” he said.
“We want to show policymakers, business leaders, and global public health organisations that a severe pandemic may be as disruptive to a country as a national security event can be. All these events have led to growing awareness of the potential challenges, but unfortunately we’ve seen that among policymakers and business leaders this awareness waxes and wanes. The response to all the exercises we’ve done have been encouraging.”
Last week, Dr Toner said China’s efforts to contain the current outbreak were “unlikely to be effective” and “the cat’s already out of the bag”. “The point that we tried to make in our exercise back in October is that it isn’t just about the health consequences,” he told Business Insider. “It’s about the consequences on economies and societies.”
NETFLIX DROPS SCARY NEW PANDEMIC DOCUMENTARY SERIES AS CORONAVIRUS SPREADS
Earlier this month, Netflix revealed the first trailer for – as Observer described it – its “frighteningly relevant” upcoming docuseries that speaks to the “heroes on the front lines of the battle against influenza … about their efforts to stop the next global outbreak”.
Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak posits that another large-scale influenza outbreak similar to the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people, is inevitable.
“When we talk about another flu pandemic happening it’s not a matter of if but when,” Dr Dennis Carroll from USAID says in the trailer. “The result would be hundreds of millions of people that would likely die.”
The show delves into the challenges posed by the rise in anti-vaxxers and follows efforts by researchers developing a universal flu vaccine to attract funding from wealthy benefactors like Bill Gates.
Dr Syra Madad from the New York City Health and Hospitals’ Special Pathogens Program also appears in the show, describing the ease with which a respiratory virus could spread through the city via air travel. “Influenza is very hard to predict. It takes one person – one host – to lead to a pandemic,” she says.
The timing of the show, with its ominous episode titles – “Pandemic Is Now”, “Seek Don’t Hide”, “Prayers Might Work” and “Don’t Stop Now” – has naturally raised eyebrows, with many on Twitter describing it as “creepy” and “suspicious”.
“The timing of this is a little to obvious for me bruh,” one YouTube user said. Another joked, “That moment when Netflix releases a virus to boost the relevance of their new docuseries.”
A Chinese social media user noticed a familiar logo.
A Chinese social media user noticed a familiar logo.Source:Supplied
CHINESE BIOTECH FIRM SHARES LOGO WITH EVIL CORPORATION FROM RESIDENT EVIL
Last year, Chinese fans of the Resident Evil video game series noted a real-life pharmaceutical company based in Shanghai had a nearly identical logo as Umbrella Corp, the fictional bad guys behind the creation of a world-ending zombie virus.
Shanghai Ruilan Bao Hu San Biotech Limited features a turquoise-and-white version of Umbrella Corp’s iconic red-and-white logo. A photo of the company’s headquarters sign was first uploaded by a Chinese social media user.
A screenshot of the company’s official website showed that, yes, that is its real logo. Strangely enough, Lanshan, the web design company that featured the screenshot of Shanghai Ruilan Bao Hu San Biotech’s site in its client portfolio, removed the page shortly after it made headlines.
A cached version is still available via the Internet Archive. It describes Shanghai Ruilan Bao Hu San Biotech as an “industry group with wide influence in the field of life and health”, covering “stem cell storage and clinical applications, tumour immune technology, animal seed industry technology research and development and industrial application, animal commercial cloning, beauty body and anti-ageing, genetic testing and precision medicine, drug development and disease models”.
Although the story is six months old, it has been resurfaced by internet users in light of the coronavirus outbreak. They point out that “corona” is an anagram for “racoon”. And where is Resident Evil set? Raccoon City. Spooky.
credits: https://www.news.com.au ://bit.ly/37OoSlS
frank.chung@news.com.au
