Health and well-being

As the countries around the world compete to get the greatest number of their inhabitants vaccinated, we wanted to go back in time to explore what is behind this race. Is it a bat virus as many tend to believe? And did it originate in a laboratory, as many are now asserting?

There are many ideas out there, but nobody seems to know for sure what it is all about, except that it is indisputably a virus. Nonetheless, its genome bears traces of human intervention, indicating its development as a biological weapon. This has been sufficient for the “conspiracy theorists” to have a field day with it, including claiming that it was released by China to launch germ warfare upon all the other countries of the world or that the “globalists” have let it lose to decimate the world’s elderly and poor and bring everybody else to heel.

However, in favor of the argument that its release was an accident are two unavoidable points. The first is that one does not develop a virus as a germ warfare agent without also developing a proper antidote, ideally both a vaccine and a treatment. In this Covid19 case, it’s obvious that the researchers had not come to this point yet, leaving the world completely bereft. In other words, if, indeed, those who developed this virus intended to use it to do harm, they were obviously not at all ready to use it.

The second point is the utter disarray in the response everywhere, including in China whose scientists appear to have been literally flummoxed by it, hence the time it took them to figure out exactly what it was so that they could warn the world without appearing to be panic-mongers.

Further, that the Chinese set it lose on the world is contradicted by their publishing, on 12 January 2020, the genome that they had hastened to map, whereas they could have registered it as intellectual property and kept it secret. And it was precisely in that map of the genome that we see the 16 alien nucleotides that testify to human intervention indicative of harmful intent.

As time goes by, the voices claiming a leak from a military laboratory, accidental or voluntary, are gaining more and more attention worldwide. As early as 7 December 2001, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) collapsed in Geneva without agreement on a legally binding enforcement protocol, leaving the different States the “liberty” to pursue their research on bioweapons and toxins as long as they claimed such research was for “defense” purposes. One can only wonder if this virus is the result of research carried on in the name of “defense”.

Although the virus is commonly attributed to a high security laboratory in Wuhan, more and more researchers are tending to believe that it came out of a military laboratory in another country, and that it traveled with soldiers who attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019. This may explain why traces of the virus were found in Europe in December 2019 according to French, Italian and Spanish studies. That nobody officially wants to acknowledge this is troubling but understandable, for this would be an acknowledgement of states’ continuous research on bioweapons in violation of the Bioweapons Treaty.

And there are many other aspects that come into play when we start looking into this issue besides research in biomedical technology: finance, national pride, military strategy etc.

Let us go one year and half back in time when, all of a sudden, we got the messages about lock-downs and a dangerous virus threatening our lives through the illness it causes, COVID-19.

Many people were inclined to downplay it at first, but as time went by, they realized that it was, indeed, serious. China was the first ones to take strict measures to hamper the spreading of the virus.

Since the beginning of the pandemic there have been more than 2 million deaths attributed to it, and the toll is still rising even as new variants have sent waves of fear and despair throughout the world. We have seen the Delta variant, the Colombian and others. It seems that there is still no end and that new strains can emerge and gain ground quickly.

Today in France one cannot enter a restaurant, or have a drink on an outside terrace if one does not have a “SaniPass”. It has given rise to a sort of segregation within the population. Those who have gotten their one or two shots (according to the product) get their Sanipass whereas the others don’t and therefore are excluded from social activities – the gym, the movies, restaurant meals or simply having a drink with a friend.

People stand in lines to get their shots. You see them everywhere – outside the pharmacies, in the specialized labs. The waiting lists are getting longer and longer.

Pfizer and Moderna emphatically stated last year in the run-up to the launch of the injection campaigns in December that these shots do not confer immunity nor do they stop transmission. Indeed, Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, keeps exhorting people to get vaccinated because the shots “prevent serious disease, hospitalization and death”. Never any mention of immunity or stopping transmission. Yet it is through transmission that the virus mutates and develops more virulent strains, including strains resistant to the very vaccines that Ms Walensky is promoting.

Public opinion is divided. There are those who fervently believe that the only way forward is by means of vaccination, while others logically ask: why – if vaccination doesn’t make one immune nor stop transmission? Almost every day there are demonstrations against the pass, which is seen by many as a dictatorial first step of the President and his men. Despite strong opposing public opinion, the authorities are pursuing their objectives, leaving the ordinary citizen to feel more and more controlled.

Initially, there were about 200 different vaccine types according to the World Health Organization, and this number has now been reduced to 16 different vaccines at various stages of development. Each vaccine has its specificity and represents its region or country. When France’s Institut Pasteur backed out, announcing on 25 January 2021 that their vaccine project was not up to the expected standards, it came as a big surprise and disappointment to the French, and their national pride suffered a blow.

Modena and Pfizer-BioNtech are mRNA vaccines, meaning that parts of the coronavirus’s genetic code is injected into the body, triggering the body to begin making viral proteins that will act in combating viral infection. It has often been pointed out that the mRNA is a new and unknown technology, but Siddkaritha Datta of the World Health Organisation said in a press conference that this is not the case, for research on this has been underway for over 10 years. However, its application to SARS-CoV-2 is new, and nobody knows for sure what the long-term result will be.

Some say that this is not enough to train the whole immune system to attack any invading virus. So, in addition to the mutation of the virus, which is unpredictable, nobody can really foretell the success rate of these vaccines in the long run.

The least that one can say is that most governments seem to have been less than transparent in informing the public. This undermines faith in precisely those public institutions that are the only ones with sufficient scope and authority to lead us in confronting this crisis. A major dose of transparency at all level is the only logical starting point if the authorities are to regain credibility and if the people are to understand just what this is all about and cooperate.

RJP & FM