According to an op/ed in the Dallas News, skepticism is a good policy when dealing with unsourced spewing on the internet, especially in light of the mindless conspiracy theories on any number of subjects that get passed around social media as truth.
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The coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, originated in Wuhan City, Hubei Province in China, and is rapidly spreading across the world.
The first case was reported in Wuhan December 21, 2019. Symptoms include fever, shortness of breath, severe cough and pneumonia which, in more severe cases, can lead to impaired kidney and liver function and kidney failure. The incubation period for the coronavirus is still unknown, but estimates range from 14 days to 30 days.
While, to date, there have been a limited number of reported cases in the U.S., the U.S. military has designated several detention sites around the country to quarantine Americans, should the situation take a turn for the worse.
Francis Boyle, who for decades has advocated against the development and use of bioweapons, suspects COVID-19 is a weaponized pathogen that escaped from Wuhan City’s Biosafety Level 4 facility, which was specifically set up to research coronaviruses and SARS. Boyle was the one who called for biowarfare legislation at the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and the one who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by George H. W. Bush.
The U.S. government spent $100 billion on biological warfare programs since September 11, 2011, up until October 2015.
According to Boyle, the COVID-19 virus is a chimera — something wished for but, in fact, impossible to achieve. It includes SARS, an already weaponized coronavirus, along with HIV genetic material and possibly flu virus. It also has properties that allow it to spread a greater distance than normal.
As a result of his antibiological warfare work, which goes back to the early days of the Reagan administration, Boyle has carefully followed "mysterious outbreaks of disease in both humans and animals around the world" that have appeared since then.
In addition to China, coronavirus cases have also been reported in at least 23 other countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and France.
The hysteria being drummed up follows a well-worn pattern where the population is kept in a state of fear about microbes so that drug companies can come to the rescue with yet another expensive (and potentially mandatory) drug or vaccine.
So far, most of those who have died have been elderly. Fortunately, yet strangely, few children have been reported with coronavirus symptoms. Children’s immune systems are not fully developed and therefore, they are usually more susceptible to illness.
Even though few children have reported symptoms, children have been infected. This same pattern of benign disease in children was seen in SARS and MERS. SARS had a mortality rate averaging 10%, and yet no children, and just 1% of youths under 24, died, while those older than 50 had a 65% risk of dying.
Fifteen years ago, headlines warned the U.S. was facing a cataclysmic extermination event — the Avian flu — and photos from the 1918 flu epidemic heightened the fear factor to a fever pitch. Then-President George W. Bush Jr. projected 2 million Americans would die from bird flu with the best-case scenario taking only 200,000 lives.
The final death count in the U.S. from that pandemic was zero.