I believe these are very
important questions that continue to dominate headlines as the world battle
COVID-19 which until February 2020 was thought to be a Chinese problem. In this
write up I attempt to explore the intricate conspiracy theories that have
emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying catastrophic
health puzzle that confronts humanity. I will also attempt to share light on
the biological weaponry industry across the globe from a pure international
management and public policy perspective. The political and moral undertones in
these industries are the subject of other write-ups in the near future.
To begin with, the issue of
conspiracy theories in the wake of an epidemic is not new. When the Ebola
crisis was at its peak in Africa, there were rumours that it was a eugenic
weapon, manufactured by some countries to suppress black people in general.
Similar suggestions have been
made by sentimentalist about the invisibility surrounding the HIV-AIDS
pandemic, the 2019 malaria outbreak in Burundi, the 2019 dengue fever outbreak
in Africa and the Middle East, the 2018 Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala, the
2009 H1N1 flu virus, the 2015 Zika virus etc were all posited to have been
deliberately engineered to cause human-induced harm to one group of people or
the other.
These discussions fall within
the purview of the development of biological weapons that dates back centuries
ago. History has it that one of the first recorded cases of the use of
biological weapons against enemies occurred in 1347 when Mongol forces hurled
plague-infested bodies into a port in present-day Ukraine.
The diseases were then picked by
Italian ships to Europe and that started the Black Death pandemic that killed
25 million people in Europe over four years. In 1717, Russian forces catapulted
plague-infested corpses in Tallin (Estonia) in a fight against Swedish forces
while in 1763, smallpox virus-infested blankets were passed on to Indian troops
by British soldiers causing a devastating epidemic among their ranks. There are
several records of deliberate use of biological weapons and their devastating
effect during the two world wars.
To avert the future reoccurrence
of this unprecedented humanitarian crisis caused by biological weapons, the
international community negotiated successfully to halt the production of
chemical and biological weapons after World War I and reinforced the ban in
1972 and 1993 by prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and
transfer of these weapons.
As of 2013, a total of 180
states and Taiwan had signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) formerly
known as Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and
Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their
Destruction.
Under the terms of the BWC,
member states are prohibited from using biological weapons in warfare and from
developing, testing, producing, stockpiling, or deploying them. Instead,
countries were encouraged to channel their biological weapon resources to
productive industrial uses such as pest control, disease control, poison
detection, food production etc.
For example, China started
cultivating the special Chinese ducks as powerful biological weapons to fight
against locust invasion of farms during the dry weather seasons. One Chinese
duck can “control” a 4-square-meter of land and can eat at least 200 large size
locusts in a single day. Using ducks to prevent locust plague is economically
and environmentally friendly compared with spraying pesticides.
In February 2020, a reported
number of 100,000 to 200,000 Chinese ducks were sent to Pakistan to help the
country fight the locust invasion of their farms. Despite the ban on biological
weapons, a number of states have continued to secretly pursue biological
warfare capabilities, seeking a cheaper but still deadly strategic weapon
rather than following the more difficult and expensive path to nuclear weapons.
US Senator Thomas Bryant Cotton
is probably the most visible US personality to suggest that the deadly
coronavirus may have originated in a high-security biochemical lab
in Wuhan. According to him, his main source of information is a study
published by Chinese scientists in the Lancet, which he called a “respected
international science journal”.
In February 2020, when the
epidemic was at its peak in China the Acting US Assistant Secretary of State
for Europe and Eurasia; Philip Reeker accused Russia in an interview with
Agence France Presse-AFP of using fake Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
accounts to spread false theories that suggest that COVID-19 is a US bioweapon
engineered by the CIA to “wage economic war on China.
Zhao Lijian (a spokesman for the
Foreign Ministry in China) also openly associated the US with the possible
exportation of the virus from the US to Wuhan. This was after Robert Redfield,
who is the director of US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had
disclosed to US Congress that some US soldiers who took part in a military
championship game in Wuhan in October 2019 when the virus was unknown in Wuhan
had tested positive with the virus. Robert Redfield had also disclosed to the
US Congress that some people in the US who were previously thought to have died
of influenza actually tested positive for COVID-19 long before the disease
surfaced in Wuhan.
It is gainsaying that, the
mention of US, China and Russia does not in any way suggest that they are the
only countries interested in the bioweapon industry, but in doubt at front
liners in global weapon manufacturing and distribution.
Indeed over the last two weeks a
video of the late ex-president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein has gone viral in which
he is heard accusing the US of attempting to attack Iraq with coronavirus in
the 1990s. On March 22, 2020, Kate Feldman reported for the New York Daily News
that Iran’s Supreme Leader; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran had rejected US
medical aid to fight COVID-19 in the country because they believed the US will
use it as an opportunity to spread the virus to Iran to make the government
unpopular.
A critical examinations of the
main countries involved in the cycle of accusations and counteraccusations
about bioweapons shows that these countries have been unfriendly nations for a
long time and their feud usually spills over into an otherwise positive medical
safety initiative to cultivate viruses for public health protection.
Even though biological weapons
are banned across the globe, the practice of allowing nations to cultivate or
keep highly contagious and pathogenic viruses like Coronavirus is permitted,
not new, not secretive and not uncommon in so far as its objectives are
approved within the framework of international conventions.
It is similar to laboratories
created to develop nuclear or atomic energy for positive purposes across the
globe but subsequently abused for other destructive purposes. In the case of
biomedical science, these high-level labs are called Bio-Safety Level 4 Labs
(BSL-4).
BSL-4 labs provide top level
security for scientists to handle pathogens of the highest risk (Group 4), such
as Ebola, Lassa and Nipah viruses. BSL-4 labs diagnose and investigate these
types of pathogens without endangering the staff or the population at large,
yet accidents can occur just as accidents occur in hospital theatres leading to
loss of lives. Currently, there are 52 Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories
across the world. 15 of them are in the US, 6 in the UK, 1 in China
(Wuhan), 1 in Russia, 4 in Australia, 4 in Germany, 3 in India 2 each in
Taiwan, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, and Korea. The others are located in other
countries.
In developing countries, in
particular, industries that are perceived as dangerous like weapon
manufacturing, nuclear and atomic physics, nano-technology, bioweapon, etc is
not very popular but are vibrant industries in a lot of developed countries
such as US, Canada, Japan, China, Russia, Italy, France, etc.
Most of the labs in Africa are
levels 1 and 2 with a few level 3 biological labs that handle basic parasites,
bacteria and less pathogenic viruses. While studying at the University of Granada in Spain in the between 2010 and 2013,
a Russian colleague confronted me on why I was wasting time studying what i was studying
instead of chemistry. Again while studying in South Africa, a Chinese friend
asked me why most African students in the school were studying management, international politics (like myself), political science and
finance instead of studying science, technology and engineering as the Chinese
were doing.
In both instances, I understood
the messages they were communicating about the priorities of an African
educational system very clearly. It is therefore not surprising that only two
BSL-4 labs (out of the 52) are in Africa. These are the Centre International de
Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon and the National Institute for
Communicable Diseases in South Africa.
The lack of interest in these
perceived dangerous industries and the pressure from developed countries to
stop investing in them may explain why all the stock of Uranium in my home
country (Ghana) has been sold to China and its Atomic Energy Commission is not
very beneficial to the ordinary citizen. A brief history of the BSL-4
Laboratory in Wuhan is important to set the mistrusts in the creation of level
4 biosafety laboratories into context.
The BSL-4 laboratory at the
Wuhan Institute of Virology was opened in January 2015. The facility is jointly
owned by China and France. On February 23, 2017, the then French Prime
Minister; Bernard Cazeneuve visited officially inaugurated the joint initiative.
The first contagious virus to be transferred to the lab was the Ebola virus
from Africa. Wuhan’s laboratory is under the management of the National Health
and Family Planning Commission and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Its vision
is “to operate top-notch scientific research to respond to diseases based on
Chinese and French expertise”.
Mr. Yaping Zhang, Vice President
of China Academic of Sciences addressed the inaugural ceremony with these words
“the laboratory will help China to strengthen the capability of preventing and
controlling outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases and aid scientific
research and development of antiviral drugs and vaccines”.
Since only BSL-4 laboratories
keep such dangerous viruses and considering their potency for warfare,
there is the growing suspicion that countries hosting BSL-4 Labs uses
them to secretly produce bioweapons hence the linkage between Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab
and COVID-19. Recently, terrorist groups such as Al-Qaida, ISIS, etc have also
started manufacturing their own bioweapons.
This underlines the growing
interest in bioterrorism as a field of study and a university in Ghana has
started the process to deliver a bachelor program in bioterrorism to study this
field more accurately. The global mistrust in the possible use of viruses for
bioweapons is well known to China and other nations hence they seize every
opportunity to assuage the fears of the global public when these issues come
up.
For example during the visit of
the French Prime Minister to Wuhan’s BSL-4 Laboratory in 2017, the Director of
the Institute, Mr. Zhiming Yuan emphasized that transparency is the cornerstone
of the laboratory, and an open culture is of vital importance to guarantee the
security of the Laboratory.
Beyond the BSL-4 labs, countries
also suspect that other secret installations exist for the development of
vibrant bioweapon industry across the globe. In 2018 the Nuclear Threat
Initiative of the US doubted China’s public declaration of being in compliance
with the Biological Weapon Convention. Past and present U.S. government
agencies have alleged that China has a small-scale offensive biological weapons
program.
Only “credible evidence” stands
between the US and the claim that Chinese entities have transferred control of
biological weapons-related items to nations of proliferation concern such as
Iran. In 2008, the US Congressional Research Service reported from unclassified
sources that China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, and Syria have some
bioweapon capability without much certainty and detail.
Conversely, China, Iran, Israel,
North Korea, Russia, and Syria suspects that the US and its allies are also
producing bioweapons without credible evidence. These countries believe that
military medical institutions and toxin research and development centres in the
US are dual-use structures for education and biological weapon manufacturing.
But in reality, a lot of
developed countries (even those without BSL-4 Laboratories) appear to be
secretly developing bioweapons as part of its biotechnology infrastructure
including viruses. This is a certainty without proof and the possibility of
viruses leaking from BSL-4 to cause an epidemic is a proof without certainty.
The International Committee of
the Red Cross supports this assertion when they state that “today’s advances in
life sciences and biotechnology, as well as changes in the security
environment, have increased concern that long-standing restraints on the use of
chemical and biological weapons may be eroding”. The hypocrisy in the biological
weapon industry is similar to that in the chemical or nuclear weapon industry.
If you think your neighbour is having more than you and you feel threatened,
you make noise to make them look bad.
It is an open secret that the US
like others produces its own nuclear weapons in secret, and indeed the US is
the only country in the world to have successfully fired a nuclear bomb in
Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II. However, due to the threat from
North Korea and, Iran etc, the US will constantly ring alarm bells to court
global disaffection for these countries without disclosing theirs. These
countries (North Korea and, Iran) also are constantly spreading anti-American
sentiments among their citizens and the global public to court international sympathy.
Thus Anti-America, Anti-China,
Anti-Islam, Anti-Black, Anti-Arab, Anti-Israel, Anti-Japan, Anti-Russia and
Anti-Korea sentiments etc have all subtly contributed to nourishing a
flourishing undercover bioweapon market across the world. Finally, just as
nuclear accidents occur in atomic and nuclear laboratories as was witnessed in
Chernobyl (Soviet Union) and Bhopal (India), accidents can occur in BSL-4
laboratories and highly contagious pathogenic viruses can escape to cause
widespread epidemics in the catchment area or spread abroad.
This is at the centre of the
“Wuhan lab conspiracy theory” but this “invincible biomedical conundrum”
will remain unproven. Many patients have died in hospitals by medical
negligence but the truth will never come out. Most importantly, even without
virus leakages from BSL-4, highly contagious and pathogenic viruses can emerge
and mutate.
Most of the greatest epidemic
cases in history occurred when there were no virus labs and bioweapon
industries. As human as we are, we cannot ignore the thin truism in these
conspiracy theories but we need to set the boundary on how much of it is too
far and how far of it is too much. “Stay at Home”
