On the Wuhan Virus Panic

Something just does not add up with the coronavirus “pandemic” that began in China late last year. The Chinese government locked down the city of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, in a futile attempt to prevent the spread of the virus. Why? The COVID-19 virus appears to be very similar in its effect to influenza in that it kills the old and immunocompromised. Yet there is no such concern with the flu which every year kills tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of others around the world. Over 99% of those who die of the flu are over the age of 65. Is that good for the economy or bad for the economy? After the collapse of the Japanese economy in 1989, the government suspended Japan’s public school influenza vaccination program because mass herd immunity does not save the lives of the young, but rather primarily saves the lives of the retired drawing social security benefits. It is also interesting to note that the U.S. does not force its school children to get flu vaccinations even though this would save the lives of the elderly.

Either the Chinese government knows something it is not saying or it panicked, or both. There are three possibilities: (1) the virus actually kills the young as well as the old, or (2) the virus is much more contagious and/or much more deadly than the flu, or (3) the virus escaped from a bioweapons laboratory and the authorities feared the worse, not knowing its actual lethality. Getting information from the Chinese has been difficult, but reports from South Korea and Europe indicate that the virus does not kill the young and healthy. In the U.S. the average age of death so far for the virus is 80, according to the Surgeon General. The flu is extremely contagious and rips through schools, sports teams, factories, etc.; so far COVID-19 does not appear to be any worse. But COVID-19 could have a much higher death rate than the flu, made worse by the fact that we have no vaccine against it as yet.

The Chinese have a saying: the Japanese got rich before becoming old but we have become old before becoming rich. The smallpox virus attacked the young and healthy and wiped out at least 75% of the Indian populations of the Americas between the arrival of Columbus and the arrival of the Pilgrims. Now small pox exists only in bioweapon labs, having been eliminated worldwide via vaccine. The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed tens of millions around the world, primarily those between 20 and 40 with peak age of 28. COVID-19 is not like small pox or the Spanish Flu. It is like our yearly seasonal flu, or perhaps the flu on steroids if it has a much higher death rate. So it might overwhelm China’s medical system in the short run, but in the long term it would help with the consequences of its one child policy by eliminating the old and unproductive in large numbers. Was this planned? Hardly. But the incompetence of the Chinese could redound to their ultimate benefit much as the Black Plaque gave birth to the Renaissance.

In November 2015 a study was published in Nature Medicine entitled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.” The study was done in a lab at the University of North Carolina and was partially funded by the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China. The lead author was Dr. Ralph Baric, but two of the coauthors came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, namely Xing-Yi and Zhengli-Li Shi. The paper describes how “gain of function” genetic engineering technology was used to enhance the coronavirus, supposedly to prove that a bat coronavirus could mutate so as to infect human beings. Obviously, such research has biowarfare implications, and in October of 2013 the U.S. government announced a temporary moratorium on such research for fear that these lab produced chimera viruses could escape into the general population. Nevertheless, the North Carolina project was grandfathered in and allowed to proceed as it was near to completion. Once published it was denounced by other virologists as potentially dangerous.

Inevitably, the Chinese scientists brought the technology and perhaps the engineered coronavirus itself back to Wuhan. China’s main bioweapons warfare lab is located in Wuhan. It has been reported by Fox News that in February the Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced plans to improve laboratory security. I suspect that COVID-19 escaped from their bioweapons facility and when top authorities were informed, they panicked. That initial panic has reverberated around the world, accelerated by irresponsible media that sees an opportunity for both financial and political gain.

The Chinese government is already regretting its initial reaction, and is trying to backtrack to salvage its economy. It has announced that the rate of increase is declining, and if that is true the virus may be seasonal like the flu. Alternatively, they may be cutting back on testing to help convince people to return to work. Unfortunately, the panic is in full swing in the United States led by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other medical “experts.” Like the old saying about “lemmings to the sea”, one state government after another has announced the closure of all “nonessential” business in a vain attempt to slow or contain the spread of the virus. Not only is the virus too widespread to be contained, but testing on cruise ships shows that about half of all those testing positive for COVID-19 are asymptomatic and remain so through their 14 days of quarantine. So if half of the infected population shows no symptoms but spreads the virus, how can a policy of quarantine work? It can’t, and on 3/21/20 the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health threw in the towel announcing that doctors give up on testing patients in the hope of containing the outbreak and instructing them to test patients only if a positive result could change how they are treated. Even if we could slow the spread of the virus (flatten the curve) we would prolong the crippling of our medical system from weeks to months.

The panic on the part of our medical and political leaders, driven by a media gone wild, threatens our entire economy. It will crash in some misbegotten attempt to save the lives of septuagenarians and octogenarians. If that happens then millions more Americans will be living on the streets, and we will have a real public health crisis. How bad could it get? Between 1988 and 1994, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russian economy, the average lifespan of the Russian male dropped by 8 years (age 65 to age 57). What we are witnessing is not medicine, it is madness.

– Gary Gallo, MD