Did the virus come from a lab? Although hacking computers with digital viruses is far less messy, in love and warfare all is possible. This must have been one of former US president Trump’s murkier thoughts: in love and bacteriological warfare all is possible. Now he is not a president anymore, it’s a bit of a surprise the question is on the political agenda again: Did the virus come from a lab, or not?
Nobody, I in the least, believes to possess predictive gifts. However, on Monday, April 27, 2009, I wrote an article about the Mexican flu. In the article, I stated that the virus causing the flu had escaped from a laboratory of a Mexican pharmaceutical company.
I wrote the article as a prank. I just made it up. Until July 1, 2009. The Belgium newspaper De Morgen made my prank all too real. The Mexican Swine Flu virus had indeed come from a laboratory. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. But let me start from the beginning, and from there on explaining why an answer to this question – Did the virus come from a lab? – is important.
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Table of contents
Food security
In April 2009, the Mexican Swine Flu took on pandemic proportions. This caused considerable public and political unrest. For example, In a race against the clock, the Dutch government bought vaccines against the Mexican Swine Flu virus for 150 million euros. Money wasted, the vaccines were never used. In The Netherlands, nobody got the Mexican Swine Flu.
Although we think that we live in hyper-individualistic times, most of us trust the government. However, when it comes to the link between our health and the food we consume, governments are as vulnerable to the biggest risk factor as anybody else.
This link between our health and our food is a ‘blind’ link when it comes to the governments’ responsibility for food security. And a highly challenging political topic. The biggest risk factor of food security is human inadequacy.
This is the same for the Mexican Swine Flu. If we no longer eat pigs, there would not be so many pigs, and, very likely, no Mexican Swine Flu. At least that is what I thought.
Related: Lifespan and Nutrition, an often Neglected Partnership
Overcrowding and over-breeding
In my article of April 2009, I marked the most important risks concerning food security. The rapid spread of the Mexican Swine Flu is a typical symptom of overcrowding and over-breeding: too many animals and too many people, in too little space. Take for instance Mexico City: there live 20 million people.
I would not be surprised if I was told that in Mexico City live as many pigs as people. To what extent unsanitary behavior, in this environment, plays a role in the spreading of the Mexican Swine Flu, I cannot even start to imagine.
The human response to the outbreak of this specific flu is also worth an anecdote. The first thing people thought was that with enough money and with the right rules (stay at home), and the right technology (mouth masks), everything would be fine. However, the pandemic showed no mercy. The estimates are that just over half a million people died. Most of them in undeveloped countries.
Pure speculation
From here on, I started to speculate. I ‘examined’, so to say, how the Mexican Swine Flu had actually emerged. My line of speculation more or less shared the following course. I argued that it is very well possible that pigs have genetically engineered the original flu virus AH1N1.
This is not a joke. Animals, plants, and humans are able to manipulate genes through natural selection. If those genes work hard enough, they will probably also be able to manipulate cohabiting viruses (viruses sharing the same body).
However, I served an alternative argument: the virus causing the Mexican Swine Flu escaped from the laboratory of a Mexican pharmaceutical company.
My argument was that pharmaceutical companies regularly construct new flu viruses. They genetically engineer these viruses to be able to develop new preventative vaccines. Basically, they do this with the best of intentions. In this way, sufficient vaccines and medication can be produced just in time to fight any future new viruses.
I thought the joke I made was authentic. However, already in 1979 the famous and always very serious French historian Fernand Braudel wrote: “In fact, the vaccines almost always follow a wave of infection. Hence, some labs try to stay one step ahead by mutating current flu viruses in a test tube to develop a vaccine that can answer all the variations that might emerge in the future!”
Mind-blowing
And, of course, sometimes something flies out of a laboratory window (this can be positive too, given the example of penicillin). It is also possible that a farmer gave up his pig for a lab test. After the farmer got the pig back home, it sneezed and coughed. “Probably from the air conditioning in the lab,” the farmer explained to his wife.
Fortunately, the pig recovered. The farmer and his wife, however, died fourteen days later in the ICU of the local hospital! In the meantime, they infected the neighbors, the feed supplier, the vet, and the accountant. Before anybody noticed, the United Nations Security Council met.
Don’t worry, I made this all up. It was a prank. A little bit morbid, yes, I agree. However, real-life can even be far more morbid.
In my article of April 2009, I argued how mind-blowing it appeared to me how the world watched totally inert how hundreds of thousands of Tutsi’s and Hutu’s in Africa slaughtered each other. And the same world, at the same time, completely flipped out when people died of unknown flu in an overcrowded region, from a virus they probably engineered themselves.
The truth has no bounds
Some 3 months later my mind blew out again. All my speculations, actually those of Braudel of course, appeared to be true. The homepage of the Belgian daily De Morgen headlined: “The swine flu may come from a test tube” (Kris Jacobs, De Morgen, July 1, 2009).
Let me quote Kris Jacobs: “The current pandemic might not have happened if some laboratory technician had handled his test tubes more carefully thirty years ago. After all, the AH1N1 viruses no longer circulated among people until a variation appeared again in 1977, which was last seen in 1950, making it plausible that it had hidden itself in a freezer compartment of a research lab for all these years.”
Jacobs explains that the AH1N1 virus variant reappeared in 1977 for the first time in a U.S. military base: Fort Dix in New Jersey. One soldier died, 230 were infected.
The same strain of virus appeared, also in a U.S. military base, in 1918, and killed an estimated 17-100 million people worldwide. Totally unjustified, this 1918 pandemic was called the Spanish flu.
Virologists call themselves ‘collectors of viruses’. Somewhere in a lab, someone has been careless, infected him- or herself, and subsequently his or her family. A few months later, the virus conquered the world.
It is rather ironic to read in Jacobs’ article of 2009 the following quote of a virologist: “If it wasn’t this virus, you would have had to deal with another one somewhere else sooner or later.”
Did the virus come from a lab?
And yes, there it was, 10 years after, at the end of 2019. The other virus: SARS-CoV-2. Contrary to the Spanish Flu and Mexican Swine Flu variations, the disease caused by the SARS virus, COVID-19, is extremely lethal for the oldest and most vulnerable people. Again, the question is: Did the virus come from a lab? No answers yet.
However, the French historian Braudel offers an alternative explanation in his 1979-book: “Since humans have liberated themselves from their animal, primordial state, and dominate the rest of living beings, they behave like a macro-parasitic predator. At the same time, however, they are besieged by a horde of tiny organisms, microbes, germs, viruses; in short, humans, in turn, are a victim of micro-parasitism.”
It’s my belief both types of predating parasites are inseparably linked. By consistently and vigorously destroying ecosystems and biodiversity, we undermine our personal immune systems. Let’s face this and change this, or perish. There are no more choices left. Or are there?
Vaccination hysteria
It is dangerous to present a one-sided picture. When it comes to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 disease, we’re overwhelmed with the one-sided pictures governments present us: there is one problem, the virus, and only one solution, the vaccine.
It is with the vaccine, as with many of the other so-called solutions, governments presented, and which never contributed anything to the aid of those who were really desperately in need.
For example, the lockdown has had no effect on hospital and ICU admissions. The washing and disinfection of hands were totally unnecessary. And in all the time that everybody was fixated on these ‘solutions’ and the vaccine, not one government thought about, or gave priority to, a medical therapy for those who caught COVID-19 and really needed some serious support.
However, governments never learn. Again, with their vaccine hysteria, they support an unhealthy path, by forcing on everybody something, which does not even support those who are really in need.
Unhealthy and vaccinated? All doors will open for you. Healthy and not vaccinated? All doors are closed for you. It is and remains a form of medical apartheid. With excruciating consequences for those who are really in need.
How do you cope with the social pressures of vaccination hysteria? Please write your answer in the comment box below.
This was a very interesting article. A friend of mine calls the covid pandemic ” a hoax”. I wouldn’t call it that, because many people have died. I know people who were really sick with covid. My best friend had it too (he’s diabetic) but fortunately he recovered.
It’s an interesting question, was the virus engineered in a lab or does it come from the way we treat our environment and all it inhabitants and from our deplorable food system? Any virus is a great way for pharmaceutical companies to make a few million bucks. Healthcare is not about taking care of people’s health but it’s a business, unfortunately.
Several viruses were a direct result of our animal factory farming, and I believe that the way we have separated ourselves from nature and “dominate” the world in a macro-parasitical way (that is the perfect description, thank you; humans do behave like parasites) gives direct cause to those viruses, including covid-19. Instead of tackling the problem at its roots, the governments just talk about vaccines, tackling the symptoms but not the roots. Governments support our sick animal factory food system and so how will they make those changes in our food system, stop producing billions of animals for slaughter and work on creating a more sustainable, cruelty-free, and healthier food system? I doubt that governments (with very few exceptions) are willing to see that, and so they help with the pharmaceutical business of vaccines.
I can’t get vaccinated because I am highly allergic to certain vaccine components, and I will NOT risk it. People have died because of the covid vaccine. If the world gets to a point that I can’t travel to certain locations (even to my own country) because I don’t have the vaccine, then so be it, I’ll stay here in my area and travel where I can.
Hi Christine,
Thank you for your comment and compliments. You are right, COVID-19 is no hoax. It is, unfortunately, all too real. I’m glad your best friend recovered.
The thing is that there are limits to what we should accept of governments and the unsustainable agro-industrial regimes they support. This is, however, getting more and more difficult. The entire virus strategy was aimed at coercing us to comply with their pushy policies. That it had to come this far, that there are no alternatives is extremely worrying.
The irony is, of course, Western politicians have their mouths full of oppressive regimes such as Russia and China. And they’re right, these are oppressive regimes, however, it would be nice when they now and then would reflect on their own behavior and try to act a bit less complacent.
You’re right not to succumb to the blackmailing travel policies. We don’t either. The funny thing is, for years we’ve got a so-called blacklist of countries we don’t visit because of their dictatorial or otherwise inhuman or unjust policies. In the past 10 years, the list only got longer and longer.
Russia and China (and their satellites) have always been on the blacklist. We’ve added during the past 10 years countries such as Austria, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Turkey, all countries in the Middle East, many countries in South America, Canada (surprisingly dictatorial state), and during the Trump-era also the United States. There are many countries I’ve left out because otherwise, the list would be endless. The, albeit limited, free world is getting smaller and smaller.
For now, stay safe, stay healthy.
Regards,
Tom
Covid19 left me speechless at how governments decided to tackle this crisis. Ok, develop a vaccine but shouldn’t you focus on helping the people that caught this awful virus? By ignoring the main problem we are left with no solution – other than the vaccine – when and if a pandemic strikes again.
Hi Cora,
To be speechless is never a good option. Share your opinion with others just as we do.
To be honest, there were and are other governments’ decisions: wear a mask, lockdown, physically distancing, wash your hands, etc.
This didn’t prevent much and it’s still debated whether these decisions, when taken earlier, could have prevented all those people to die.
Pandemics will strike again. And because there’s so much pollution in the air, the soil, and the water, the consequences will be devastating.
Well, let’s wait and see. Perhaps we’re the next victims.
Thank you for your comment.
Regards,
Tom