COVID-19 & The Conspiracy Theories

When things go 'Wuhan' as in viral the whole world shivers by its marauding presence as there's a sense of panic.

And it's understandable especially so--when the cause of the disease remains unknown-- when records of deaths continue to surge, when infections keep rising and of course--when the virus is widening its scope almost by the day.

In December 2019, the novel Coronavirus now shortened COVID-19 swooped down like an eagle after its prey in Wuhan City (with 11 million population) in the Hubei province, China but it didn't stop there. The spillover has been massive and the fear is that things will get worse.

It's been globetrotting since. And so far according to the UN agency for health, WHO, COVID-19's antennae have reached 57 countries across the world. The respiratory disease is racking up the numbers. Fact 1) 87, 586 confirmed infections and fact 2) 2,989 deaths worldwide as of March 1, 2020.

Worrying isn't it?
And of course when it hits home.
I mean, right at your backyard that sense of panic even escalates and emotions heighten. My home state, Washington in the North West region registered its first casualty in the US. On Saturday 29, 2020 the victim believed to be a man in his 50s succumbed to the jaws of the beast. He'd not travelled outside the US and he'd also not come into contact with any suspected carrier of the disease.

In the wake of COVID-19, there have been lots of misinformation and conspiracy theories. The wacky theories have already turned some heads over heels, especially for those who love conspiracy theories.

A few days ago, I read an article that bears the semblance of what I've already alluded to. It's so riveting-- the story hooks you up right from the get-go. And it's also gut-wrenching as it details an act of horror----creates scenes that make one's stomach turn ---and rips the heart apart. It's written by an individual who identifies himself as a senior Chinese military intelligence officer who works for the Communist Party of China.

"I've information that I believe could lead to the overthrow of my government", he states in the writeup. He claims COVID-19 is orchestrated by the government of China and knows the truth about Coronavirus outbreak. The writer rubbishes the notion that COVID-19 was caused by bats and snakes.

I must state that the piece is riddled with empathy, tragedy, horror, conspiracy etc.

Thus, it makes it hard for one to believe its veracity---Someone had mentioned to me that it is a movie script. No wonder I was struck by shock. I was held spellbound. I couldn't believe myself.

It reminds me of an article Joshua Pease published in December 17, 2019. Mr Pease says: "Conspiracies are fun to dissect and debate but there's a deeper appeal: humans have a natural scepticism toward authority and power."

Isn't that true?
This so-called Chinese Communist Party agent or self-styled insider who appears to know it all about this marauding COVID-19 says his government is responsible and Coronavirus is a hoax.

Here's an excerpt of his article:
"I am a senior Chinese military intelligence officer and I know the truth about the coronavirus outbreak.

It is far worse than the media are telling you.
I am a Chinese citizen in Wuhan who occupies — or perhaps occupied — a high-ranking position in military intelligence.

I am also a member of the Chinese Communist Party...By now you will be familiar with the recent outbreak of 2019-nCoV, also known as NCP, or simply "coronavirus".

You will have heard that it originated in Wuhan, an industrial city in China and that it came from an animal — most likely a bat or a pangolin — that was sold in a wild animal market. You will have been told that it is an influenza-like illness that can in severe cases cause pneumonia, respiratory failure and death. Finally, you may have heard that although the disease is highly infectious, it is dangerous only to the elderly or to those who have a compromised immune system. The official lethality rate is approximately 2% or so.

All of that is a bunch of lies concocted by the Chinese state with the tacit support of the U.S. deep state and its friends in the European Union, Russia and Australia, and spread by the docile media in all of those countries.

Let me start by telling you that the world does not operate the way you think it does. Although countries like the US and China vie for global dominance, that competition is restricted to certain limited areas. In most ways, the two countries are more interested in cooperation so that they can stop other competing countries from gaining more power. They also have a shared interest in keeping real power out of the hands of their "ordinary" citizens. To this end, they have many different mechanisms by which they control the overwhelming majority of their media outlets. The Americans, in particular, have perfected the art of creating made-up "divisions" between their two main parties which are designed to hide the fact that both serve the same masters.

These same nations also possess technology that is far more advanced than you can imagine and which is kept carefully hidden from public view. This includes advanced artificial intelligence capable of undermining and deciding any election in the world; biological and chemical agents that can manipulate and control the thinking patterns and behaviours of citizens to terrifying degrees; highly sophisticated manipulation techniques using hypnotic practices entirely unknown to the public; and other things that I will not go into now. My point is that the great nations do not compete so much as work together. Their principal goal is to shield the true workings of the world from the "uninitiated" public.

Just to give you one example, there aren’t actually any nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. The U.S. and the Soviet Union scrapped them all in the 1970s, as did their client states. Everyone realised that those weapons could not be used without destroying the whole world, so there was no need for them; but by pretending that they still had them, the big players were able to keep the non-nuclear powers in line. Let me return to the virus. Last year, large-scale anti-government protests erupted in Hong Kong. The Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party considered these to be a grave threat to the integrity and stability of the motherland. The U.S. government and the EU both knew that the Chinese were secretly working on a biological agent that was supposed to make the protesters docile and obedient. Without going into detail, I worked on that project. We tried to develop a sort of spray that could be dispersed from helicopters or drones and that would lead to mental retardation and behavioural change.

Naturally, as Hong Kong is one of the most open and international cities in the world, the Party decided that it was too risky to release the agent in Hong Kong without first testing it. For this, it needed a great number of human guinea pigs. Two groups were identified for this.

First, we rounded up a large number of so-called "Islamic radicals" in Xinjiang Province and took them to what we called "training camps". We had already been using these camps for human experimentation for several years, but the Hong Kong protests meant that we redoubled our efforts. We exposed the inmates to various "alpha" experimental agents. As these were odourless and invisible, the subjects were not aware that they were taking part in medical trials. The resulting high rates of cancer, premature dementia, suicidal depression and death by organ failure could easily be suppressed, as the camps are located in very remote parts of our motherland.

Once the initial experiments had yielded a "beta" agent, it was transported to Hubei Province, where it was deployed in a special military testing facility outside the city of Wuhan. This was not even a particularly well-kept secret: the existence of this facility has been reported in international news. Even the fact that it is located close to the wild animal market is a known fact.

By then our President had already introduced a "social credit" system that allowed us to identify disloyal, counter-revolutionary and bourgeois elements in our society. Using the social credit scores — which are taken from online activity, electronic shopping behaviour and reports from informers in civil society — we selected some of the worst offenders. These included human rights lawyers and activists, Christians, homosexuals, artists, intellectuals, people who speak foreign languages, and other undesirables.

Once these troublemakers had been collected and placed in the testing facility, we exposed them to the Agent, which is biochemical in nature and spread in an invisible aerosol, akin to certain viruses. Initial results were encouraging, as we saw significant cognitive decline and reduction in higher mental processing facilities. Essentially, our undesirables were becoming mildly mentally disabled, which is precisely the effect we wanted to produce in order to pacify the restive population of Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the Agent also had other effects. About one week after the retardation set in, our subjects developed major anxiety and panic attacks. Eventually, they developed symptoms akin to those of paranoid schizophrenics. At that point, their bodies rapidly deteriorated. They developed massive internal bleeding; the walls of their arteries dissolved; they bled out of their eyes and orifices, and their tissue disintegrated. To put it in a more direct Western manner, they started to melt. Death usually occurred through multiple organ failure. This was preceded by at least five days of severe agony which could not be alleviated by painkillers. It was at this time that I first violated our protocol: one subject, an elderly lady who had published defamatory cartoons of our President, begged me for death with such insistence that I took pity and shot her. I was reprimanded, but fortunately, the complaint was dropped when I agreed to reimburse the cost of the bullet. I swore to myself never again to show such unnecessary emotion.

We decided that our Agent was unusable. It was far too destructive for our purposes. We wanted the population of Hong Kong to submit to us; we did not want to exterminate it.

Naturally, our American friends had by then taken an interest in our work and asked us for a sample for their own research and testing purposes. They hinted that they wished to use it to resolve certain difficulties in Venezuela. Normally we would have agreed, as we maintain friendly relations with the CIA, but given the extremely toxic nature of the Agent, we declined.

This, as it turned out, was a grave mistake.
The CIA was convinced that we had developed something very powerful and wanted to keep it to ourselves. They offered a great deal of money to one of our researchers. Foolishly, he agreed to sell them a specimen. We found out just in time for the handover and tried to stop it from happening. In the ensuing shoot-out — don’t bother to look for it in the news, it was never reported anywhere — several dozen people were killed.

More importantly, however, the Agent escaped. The shoot-out took place at the wild animal market which has been reported as the location of the "animal to human" transmission that started the outbreak. But of course, there was no such transmission; it was just the location where the CIA was supposed to receive the sealed vial containing the Agent. The vial shattered when it was dropped by the traitor who had agreed to sell it to the Americans."

Now, what do you make of it?
Is it mired in conspiracy?
Or it's a movie script?
And could there be an iota of truth in it?
"We descended from primates that tended to notice dangerous, hidden things like a predator in the grass," says Dr. Michael Shermer.

According to Dr Shermer a conspiracy theory concerns a) two or more people, b) plotting in secret, c) to gain immoral/ illegal advantage over someone else, d) without that person's knowledge.

We see that furtive plot in the agent's article.

And what does it seek to achieve?
No doubt, the idea sounds crazy but is it crazier than this one-- the Bad Booze or the Fake battle or the real war?

Both conspiracy theories turned out to be true.
But of course, we wouldn't know until the latter years. Let me also add that most conspiracy theories tend out to be false and very outrageous. However, these are exceptional.

First Bad Booze: Conspiracy-- during prohibition, the US government poisoned alcohol to keep people from drinking.

The truth: Lauren Cahn wrote in his article the 12 crazy conspiracy theories that --'manufacturers of industrial alcohol had been mixing their product with dangerous chemicals for years prior to prohibition. But between 1926 and 1933, the federal government pushed manufacturers to use stronger poisons to discourage bootleggers from turning the alcohol into moonshine.

The second one is Fake battle, real war:
This is the conspiracy-- The Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964, was faked to provoke America support for the Vietnam War. The truth-- by the time news reached American ears the facts surrounding the North Vietnamese attack on the American naval ship Maddox were already fuzzy. In fact declassified intelligence documents have since revealed that the Maddox had provided support for South Vietnamese attacks on a nearby Island thereby compelling North Vietnamese to respond in kind, according to the US Naval Institute.

9/11 has been wrought by conspiracy theories since the attack happened nearly two decades ago, but the conspirators have failed to prove their case. They blamed the US government of being responsible for the attacks.

So, why would COVID-19 be spared?
The conspirators have started early and they'd continue their false tale until it resonates with a great number of people. That's the purpose. For now, it will be hard though, to ascertain the truth or otherwise. But time will tell.

That said, be reminded that the virus is real. There's no joke about it. Therefore, let's be vigilant, common sense proactive measures such as hand washing, drinking lots of water, not touching nose, face, eyes and mouth, we are told can help prevent one from contracting the disease. Indeed, the numbers speak for itself so let's be vigilant.