CORONA AS BIOLOGICAL WEAPON

Sun Tzu, Chinese philosopher cum war strategist, had written a book titled “The Art of War”. Published in 1910 and translated into English by Lionel Giles, the book admonishes the sovereign and the generals how to conduct warfare. His foremost teaching was to win a war without fighting. He said: “all warfare is based on deception… supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting”. Modern day China follows Sun Tzu in devising biological weapons to win over the world.

All countries with solid scientific research base have chemical, biological and virology research carried out with vaccine development and disease control objectives. However, few countries do have the obnoxious objectives of creating a virus as a biological weapon to win over the world without warfare. With COVID-19 China seems to be among the first in this obnoxious objective. Or else how could one explain that China is the source of Spanish Flu, Avian Flu, SARS and now Coronavirus.

For over hundred years, China has been perfecting a flu virus. Influenza Wikipedia suggests that Spanish flu,(H1N1) that claimed 50 million life worldwide in 1918-19, originated in China. So did an epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) (H9N7) that began in Foshan municipality, Guangdong Province, China, in November 2002. Similarly, the first case of the novel avian influenza A H7N9 virus was identified on March 30, 2013 in China. By April 18 the virus had spread and detected in six different provinces and cities in China -Shanghai, Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Beijing, and Henan. Covid-19 originated in Hubei province’s capital Wuhan in December 2019 and the worldwide spread now is concern of the moment.

Several other strands such as H9N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, A(H5), are all precursors to the current corona virus but all of them have influenza generating pathogens in humans. Over the years some of them have gone resistant to antiviral drugs. Some of them are called swine flu, others avian flu, yet others SARS, but their content is potentially hazardous to humans; hence fit for biological warfare. Truly, Donald Trump, whose parental grandfather Friedrich Trump, died in Spanish flu, called Corona outbreak the result of “Chinese Virus”. All these viruses are transmitted by airborne droplets from an infected person, hence a mask could prevent spread. However, Corona has a difference. Aside from droplets, it spread through contacts and in a potentially invisible way.

Covid-19 is a potential biological weapon devised to create pandemic. It is potentially dangerous, transmits from human to humans in invisible manner, can spread exponentially, and no vaccine is available to treat it. It can help China win over the enemy without fighting a war. A country that knew about the lethality of the virus it created, kept quiet for months and allowed its infected but asymptomatic citizens travel to various parts of the world, must be held accountable for its negligence to humanity. China has tested it in the laboratory called the world and now it is pretty sure of its applicability as a bioweapon although China has also suffered like in Wuhan, Harbin and elsewhere, but those losses are dwarfed by the cumulative loss of all countries put together. China has been shedding crocodile tears about its innocence, which the world finds it hard to believe.

China’s Wuhan institute of virology in Hubei province under the Chinese academy of sciences has been consistently working on virus research since 2003 SARS epidemic, particularly to locate the source of SARS. She Zhengli was the team leader, who pioneered research on bats to earn the sobriquet as “Bat Woman’. Zhengli admits that “presence of the Corona virus in bats was ephemeral and seasonal, but an antibody reaction could last from weeks to years.” This was the base of creating a bio weapon, turning pandemic into endemic.

Zhengli found a valuable information to hunt down genomic sequences of a lethal virus. Years of research on bats since 2003, and travelling from cave to caves across China in a bat hunt, finally led to discovery of corona virus, so named due to its crown-like surface under the microscope. The virus is otherwise known as SARS-Covid 2 or Covid-19. Researches have established findings of Zhenli at Wuhan to be true.; its effects would linger for months, even years.

Earlier, Chemical weapons were used by Saddam Hussein in the Halabja and 40 other Kurdish villages in March 1988. The rainbow herbicides such as agent orange blue, white, used as a tactical weapon by the US in the Vietnam war, were primarily defoliants but having long term neurological consequences for the population. They were proven agents of bio-chemistry, but they did not create a virus, which China has done and used.

Although from SARS family, what makes Corona a contagious and formidable bio- weapon, spreading from man to man through contact, touch, droplets of sneeze and cough, are its invisibility and rapidly multiplying ability, Lungs are the battle field for medics, leading to breathlessness and outcome is death.

Aware that it can never win a war against the developed West, not even an unwinnable nuclear war, China’s desire to dominate over the West is thus virus driven – Corona that has humbled the West to helplessness. Its efforts are likely to boomerang on China sooner or later, rendering it untouchable and contactless worldwide. The day is not far off, when China has to reap what it has sown.

Author: Prof. P.L. Dash
The Author was Professor of International Relations and formerly Chair Professor, ICCR India Chair, University of World Economy and Diplomacy, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.