Readers may find it difficult to recall amid the current Snow Panic that exactly five years ago we were on the verge of the greatest panic of them all in living memory.
That was the Great Covid Panic and while the first officially recognised human cases are now given as around November 17 in Wuhan, China, the first recognition of the “pandemic” in the west was not until January 2020. And the Chinese appear to have been lying about the November date at first.
The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published its first piece on Covid 19 on January 23, 2020. That was not only written by a group of Chinese professors and practitioners, including some in Wuhan, but carried a notice that the research – and presumably the article – had been funded by the “Ministry of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission.”
We shall return to that, and to the role of The Lancet itself below. The authors claimed that the first cases “of unknown cause” had been identified in Wuhan in December 2019 and that there had been more than 800 identified cases, including by January in countries other than China itself.
They compared the new virus in seriousness to SARS, and ominously stated that “The coronaviruses already identified might only be the tip of the iceberg, with potentially more novel and severe zoonotic events to be revealed.” And how.
While there has been not a little historical revisionism regarding the mainstream media’s handling of what amounted to a concerted campaign by the Chinese state to ramp up fears in the rest of the world which had a hugely negative impact on western societies and economies, there are numerous reminders as from NBC News at the time of how many were only too happy to go along with it all. Gary Kavanagh of this parish exposed how some of the scaremongering operated here.
The first serious scientific reportage on Covid makes for interesting reading, especially as these apparently impeccable sources later provided the basis for what was an unrelenting campaign at state and mass media level in support of restrictions and vaccines and censorship of almost any and every dissenting or questioning voice. The initial openness to inquiry did not last long.
The Lancet piece written by the Chinese experts was based on their own analysis of 41 separate cases. While dense and difficult to follow for those with no medical background, the conclusion set the scene not only for what was to take place in terms of restrictions but laid the groundwork for the “origin story” of Covid-19.
It ends by referring ominously to the rapidly rising death rate and the potential for the virus to become a “global health threat.” That it did, and in no small measure due to the manner in which the panic originated and spread from China itself. The authors also established what is the generally accepted theory that, like SARS, the Covid 19 virus had been transmitted to humans from bats.
At that stage there was enough in the Chinese article to allow Science to cast doubt on the original theory that the virus had originated in the Wuhan fish food market. Daniel Lucey of Georgetown University told Science that the evidence suggested to him that it must have originated as early as November 2019 and that it “came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace.”
Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute speculated that there was plausible reason to believe that this was what had happened and Lucey further said that the Chinese authorities themselves must have known that “the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market.”
That elicited a quick response from one of the Chinese scientists involved, Bin Chao, who admitted that “Now It seems clear that [the] seafood market is not the only origin of the virus… But to be honest, we still do not know where the virus came from now.” At that stage Science referred to two scenarios: of a human bringing it into the market, or an animal or animals bringing it into the market.
Andersen later found himself at the centre of the controversy over the belief that the virus had infected humans through a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan. Andersen took the view that it had not but as the leaked Fauci emails showed, not only is this a plausible theory but that there were vested interests, and not only in China, intent on discrediting this.
Chief among these was that the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – of which Fauci was head – had grant-aided the laboratory at Wuhan from where the virus may well have originated as the consequence of a laboratory accident. Perhaps even from experiments funded by the NIAID. We do not know, and probably never will. The emails detail pressure from the American company involved, EcoHealth, to dismiss the lab leak scenario.
If the virus escaped through an accidental laboratory leak then the acceptance by the World Health Organisation and the United States health authorities of both the origin story as retailed by the Chinese Communist Party and the template designed by the CCP to impose extraordinary restrictions across the western world still requires investigation.
It also ought to be recalled that at the same time the Chinese were deliberately evasive and contradictory regarding the origin of the virus they were telling their own people and much of the peoples of the developing world that Covid 19 had been deliberately created and implanted into China by the United States. These are not stand-up guys devoted to truth and transparency.
Gript was possibly unique among Irish media in reporting on all of the madness including the measures taken by powerful interests from the US Central Intelligence Agency to Facebook censorship to suppress both the lab leak theory and any real questioning of what followed on from the “pandemic.” We, along with a small number of others including some elected representatives and members of the public, questioned the substance, efficacy and implementation of the restrictions.
I was reminded of this crazy time over the Christmas when bumping into an old chum who like myself had lost a parent during the height of the lockdown. His mother had died in a nursing home and I am not sure whether the virus was the cause or not, and I did not ask him.
He was still sad and angry at the manner in which his mother had been shut up like a criminal – except that criminals get to have regular tactile visits from their loved ones. Locked up ironically in what someone I think described – the nursing homes that is – as “petri dishes of the virus.” Recall too that the Irish state had no problem at this time releasing convicted criminals in order to safeguard them.
My father’s death had nothing to do with Covid, other than that in his case and in the case of my friend’s mother, both had ended their days bewildered by what was taking place. Myself and members of my family for the most part ignored the travel ban and other restrictions and regularly visited my father but he could not understand why his already limited life was now supposed to be confined to his small apartment.
I still recall his bewilderment at there being no one at the matches myself and my brother came down to watch on TV. A lifelong devotee of Tipperary hurling he showed no interest in their match against Limerick in November 2020 because “sure, there’s no-one there. That couldn’t be the Munster championship.”
Worse again was being followed to the altar to read a prayer at his funeral by a high-viz jacketed attendant who wanted me to come back and wash my hands. He would have gotten a rather more brusque response than mine, I suspect, from Jimmy Treacy.
Never let them do it to us again. That’s my lesson from it all.