CHAPTER 3: AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CORONAVIRUS WAS…

So, where did this coronavirus pandemic really originate?

Initially, it appeared that Wuhan was Ground Zero for the coronavirus. The official Chinese explanation linked the outbreak to the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, where meat, poultry and seafood were sold alongside live animals. However, it wasn’t very long before conspiracy theories started to circulate, often supported by nothing more than anecdotal evidence.

State-sponsored bio-terrorism has been one of the more popular hypotheses I have come across. It was, after all, only two years earlier that the indiscriminate attempted poisoning of Russians Sergei and Yulia Skripal happened in Salisbury, UK. The use of the deadly nerve agent, Novichok, necessitated some areas of the city being locked down. Meticulous decontamination was essential, a process that took 12 months, while requiring the expertise of up to 800 military personnel. The decontamination of just the Skripal’s former home took 13,000 man-hours to complete (Forces Net, 2019).

Despite the use of a WMD, the Salisbury episode was actually conducted using a chemical rather than a biological weapon. There is, however, very compelling and credible evidence associating the event with the state-enacted terrorism theory. It is perhaps also worth reiterating that between 1974-2018, non-state adversaries conducted as many as 336 terrorist attacks using chemical weapons and 35³ using biological-based weapons (START, 2019). Anthrax, botulinum toxins and ricin were listed among the biological agents of choice. So, could SARS-CoV-2 be a weaponised biological agent?

There is both trustworthy plus unsubstantiated voluminous quantities of information in the public domain that challenges the Chinese version of events. There does seem little doubt that Wuhan is where the coronavirus burst onto the world stage. But, just maybe China has been accused of a ‘crime’ it did not actually commit and Wuhan was a victim rather than the miscreant. For example, we now know that HIV/AIDS had been around for more than 60 years before it made its grand entrance when it exploded onto a totally unprepared world in the 1980s.

I have also been made aware of several people from various parts of the world who claim to have experienced COVID-19-like symptoms long before the virus even had a name. This alone suggests that the coronavirus may have been in circulation well before the Wuhan outbreak. Relating to his own experience, BBC journalist Fergus Walsh said:

In fact, the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents carried a report that claimed that “SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019”. (Deslandes, et al., 2020)

Moreover, an unsubstantiated report published by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), a Hong Kong-based publication, claimed that China’s first confirmed COVID-19 case had been traced back to 17 November 2019. This firmly contradicts the Wuhan fish market story (Ma, 2020). The SCMP report also alleged that Chinese authorities had further identified at least 266 coronavirus cases in 2019.

Although it may have initially been benign, as the ‘Chavarria et al.’ quote implies, the reality is that the virus may have been around far longer than originally thought. Reuters carried the report of the Spanish study conducted by the University of Barcelona that goes some way to substantiating this possibility. The study claimed that traces of the coronavirus were apparently found in samples of local sewage as early as March 2019. This was nine months before the Wuhan outbreak (Allen & Landauro, 2020).

Several countries have since adopted wastewater testing to check for the presence of coronavirus in the wider population, in addition to searching for the existence of virus variants. By May 2021, in the UK, a sewage testing programme covered approximately two-thirds of England’s 56 million population.

Researchers from the University of Sienna, Italy, engaged in a lung cancer screening trial, detected SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in 111 of the 959 participants. Approximately 14% were detected from blood samples taken in September 2019, five months before Italy’s first official case (Apolone, et al., 2020).

More recently, when the world was alerted to the coronavirus Omicron variant in November 2021, evidence also emerged that it was in global circulation for weeks if not months beforehand (Brean, 2021).

They can of course go by different names, but misinformation, half-truths, falsehoods, rumours, fake news and conspiracy theories are nothing new. The practice has been around for centuries, and it became very apparent during the 2002-2003 SARS and the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreaks, not to mention the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks on the US and the UK respectively. Today, in fact, some people make a great deal of money in peddling COVID-19 conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination misinformation.

When the Spanish influenza pandemic spread across the world as the First World War was drawing to a close, with radio broadcasting still in its infancy, the primary source of information was through newspapers. 100 years on, the media is hardly recognisable, with multiple communication channels now available and the capability of information circumnavigating the planet in a matter of seconds. The advent of social media has undoubtedly aided and abetted the spread of misinformation.

We are certainly seeing plenty of contributions from what I would call the disciples of modern ‘flat earth societies’ promoting their unconventional and often controversial pandemic theories. One article I came across claimed that modern flat earth societies had supporters all around the globe, which seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me. Having been censored by mainstream social media platforms, accused of distributing fake news, some have since relocated onto independent distributed server platforms that are subsidised by donations and crowd funding.

There have also been conspiracy theories circulating about the so-called ‘vaccine agenda’. This has prompted social media platforms to act to either prevent their proliferation or to add warnings that the content contains ‘false or misleading information’. Social media organisations were heavily criticised after appearing to be helpless in preventing the constant flow of fake news during the US 2016 presidential election. In the UK, GCHQ, part of the country’s security services, has been conducting an offensive cyber operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda allegedly being spread by hostile states. (Fisher & Smyth, 2020). Published by The Lancet, Correcting COVID-19 vaccination misinformation, also makes its own contribution towards addressing what is seen as a growing body of misinformation about these vaccines (Lancet, 2021).

Oh, and we must not forget the 5G conspiracy theory that it’s not really a virus we are dealing with but the radiation from 5G transmissions. Despite major health organisations categorically stating that 5G is safe, this conspiracy theory continues to persist.

To add to the mix, I have regularly come across other conspiracy theory reports that I believe are, shall we say, of dubious origin. Yet, despite the supposedly best efforts of the various social media platforms to supress and remove fake news, they still seem to proliferate. In some instances, as fast as controversial videos are removed from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, users are uploading the clips again. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have attended university, if we learned nothing else, it should have been to validate our sources of information when researching. I wish more people would do the same before just instinctively hitting the ‘share’ or ‘retweet’ buttons.

BBC specialist disinformation reporter, Marianna Spring, maintains that videos posted on YouTube by fringe groups with extreme ideas are influencing users’ views. The pandemic has pushed misinformation to new levels, with false reports about the coronavirus that are often finding a much larger audience than trusted sources.

I have also found it annoying, to say the least, after having watched a pandemic-related press conference, to then see a subsequent associated media report mis-quoting or being ‘economical’ with the truth, all in the interest of politicising or sensationalising the story. While I understand this tactic is intended to sell more newspapers or attract readers to a website in an attempt to maximise affiliate marketing revenues, I still find it an unethical practice.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus added that the world was not just fighting a pandemic, it was also fighting what he referred to as an ‘infodemic’. In attempting to counter rumours and misinformation, the WHO has a team of ‘myth busters’ working with social media platforms to counter the spread of what they classify as fake news. Some individuals who have expressed alternative opinions contrary to the mainstream pandemic viewpoint have subsequently found themselves censored by the behemoth social media platforms.

A dubious information source would typically display one or more of the following traits: an extreme bias, the systematic endorsement of propaganda or conspiracies, little or no reference to credible sources of information, a complete lack of transparency and/or is fake news. The United Nations (UN) advises that people consider the Five ‘W’s before they share an online post:

1. WHO made the post?

2. WHAT is the source of the information?

3. WHERE did it come from?

4. WHY are you sharing it?

5. WHEN was it published?

The UN’s message is simple: #TakeCareBeforeYouShare. Further information about this programme is provided via the article “5 ways the UN is fighting infodemic of misinformation” (United Nations, 2020).

One noticeable characteristic of the information age is the demand for quality reliable news, which has soared in recent times. Moreover, dependable and trusted news outlets have become a precious commodity. So, what sources of information can we actually trust? I have taken a look at several surveys conducted in the US about which are the most trusted and least trusted sources of news. As Business Insider remarked:

The Economist and the BBC consistently appear at the top of survey results. Also referring to the Pew Research Center survey, the MediaPost added:

In the UK, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries. In its 2020 News Consumption Report for the UK, it lists the BBC News TV channel and website as the primary ‘go to’ information source.

But, surely there must be other reliable information sources than just the BBC or The Economist? Well yes, there are, and while there are a number of short courses available to help people tell the fake from the genuine news article, there are some other checks that you can do to help make an informed decision about an article’s credibility. For example:

• Is a story carried by multiple websites? While this does not guarantee its accuracy, it is an encouraging indication.

• Does the website that is posting a particular story have a reputation for validating its information sources (e.g. the BBC, etc.)?

• How old is the story? We are learning more about COVID-19 almost every day that passes, so could the information on a website have been superseded?

• If the website is trying to sell you something, be suspicious, especially if it’s Dr John’s Magical COVID cure or Big Chief Dodgy Deal’s miracle snake oil. There is also a subtle sales ploy know as ‘framing’, which might ask a question, such as “have you tried the new amazing XYZ supplements?” Caveat Emptor – buyer beware!!

• If the website has a suffix of .GOV or .ORG, it will be a government or a not-for-profit website and is likely to be more reliable.

• Similarly, if the suffix is .AC (in the UK), .EDN (US) or .EDN .AU (Australia), these are examples of academic institutions, and the information is also much more likely to be credible. There will, of course, be many other credible academic institutions out there that can also be taken seriously.

In January 2021, the WHO began investigating the virus’s origins in Wuhan. Since the city was initially declared as ‘Ground Zero’ for the COVID-19 outbreak, China appears to have been caught holding a smoking gun. But, with evidence emerging of the SARS-CoV-2 virus being present in at least three European countries before the Wuhan outbreak, perhaps the WHO will need to consider asking, ‘Who actually pulled the trigger?’ A 120-page report was subsequently published and although it considered the possibility of a laboratory accident as being one of the potential causes of the pandemic, it concluded that it was extremely unlikely (WHO, 2021). However, several countries, including the US and the UK, have sharply criticised the report, implicitly accusing China of “withholding access to complete, original data and samples” (Beaumont, 2021).

2021 ushered in a change of administration in the White House. The incoming President Biden ordered that efforts to establish the origin of the virus should be intensified, including a re-examination of the theory that it originated from a Chinese laboratory. Concern had also been independently raised that research scientists in China were carrying out unsafe research activities on SARS-CoV-like novel viruses. In one way or another, they did not take the appropriate actions to work safely with SARS-CoV-2 or a precursor virus (Bostickson & Ghannam, 2021).

Moreover, in their paper entitled A Reconstructed Historical Aetiology of the SARS-Coronavirus-2 Spike, Sørensen et al., claim that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has no credible natural ancestor. They further argue that it is highly likely that this coronavirus was actually the creation of a Chinese laboratory (Sørensen et. al, 2021).

So, to conclude my thoughts on the contents of this chapter, whilst I do acknowledge their existence, despite my rant, I am sorry if I am now going to disappoint. Fascinating though some of these claims and counter-claims may be, in writing this book, it is not my intent to present any further arguments that either support or refute their rationale. Indeed, I have elected to leave that to the conspiracy theorists, who will no doubt be writing their own versions of what, where, when and how. Meanwhile, I intend to focus on the here and now of dealing with COVID-19, and whatever other future nasty contagions we have the dubious pleasure of anticipating.

³ 20 September 2020, it was reported that a package containing ricin addressed to former President Trump had been intercepted before reaching the White House (Feuer, 2020).