Category Archives: Germ Warfare

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.

Cyberspace Administration of China notice:1. Regarding livestreams of the commemorative rally for the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Armys War to Resist America and Aid Korea on October 23, strictly standardize sourcing, and use the video stream from the Central Broadcast and Television General Platform. It is forbidden to change headings without authorization or activate the on-screen comments function. Keep tabs on posts and comments.2. On October 23, there will be activities such as laying of wreaths at the War to Resist America and Aid Korea martyrs cemetery in Liaoyang and monument in Dandong, Liaoning, and the Sino-Korean Friendship Pagoda and Cemetery for the Heroes of the Chinese Peoples Volunteer Army in Pyongyang, North Korea. Related reports should not relay information from KCNA. (October 22, 2020) [Source]

This week marks the 70th anniversary of Chinas intervention in the Korean War in the thinly veiled guise of Peoples Liberation Army units rebranded as Chinese Peoples Volunteers.Xi Jinping began a week-long remembrance by visiting a memorial exhibit in Beijing on Monday.The Diplomats Shannon Tiezzi analyzed the subtext of Xis highly public visit:

In remarks at the exhibit, Xi said, The victory in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea was a victory of justice, a victory of peace and a victory of the people. He added that the spirit forged during the war will inspire the Chinese people and the Chinese nation to overcome all difficulties and obstacles, and prevail over all enemies.

Xi did not specifically mention what enemies China might be facing today, instead focusing on the figurative battle for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. But the subtext was obvious from the literal backdrop to his remarks. The United States, that past enemy, looms large as a present villain. Its noteworthy that, amid the worst downturn in U.S.-China relations since at least 1989, and arguably since ties were established in 1979, Xi chose to highlight the one actual war between the two sides.

As Joe Renouard and Woyu Liu noted in an earlier article for The Diplomat, in Chinas official narrative the Korea conflict was not only a just war, but also a vital test for the new PRC and, ultimately, a victory against a technologically superior foe. More specifically, In China today, the Korean War stands as a universally understood symbol of national unity against American belligerence. That gives the Korean War a clear resonance for the current moment. [Source]

Similarly, from William Zheng at South China Morning Post:

Junfei Wu, deputy director of Hong Kong think tank the Tianda Institute, said Xis speech at the museum had a two-pronged message for domestic and overseas audiences.

At the beginning of the Korean war, America misjudged Chinas determination to push them back. They thought China would not send troops into the Korean peninsula. But China did. Xis speech and Beijings high-profile commemorations are clear warning signals to the US not to underestimate Beijings determination to safeguard its core interests, he said.

[] Chen Daoyin, an independent political scientist and a former Shanghai-based professor, noted that from the Communist Partys perspective, historical narratives always needed to serve current politics. Xis historical evaluation of the Korean war corresponds to the current era of the new cold war confrontation between China and the US, he said. [Source]

The Dandong war memorial, mentioned in the censorship directive above, can be seen as a bellwether of Chinese relations with the outside world. Historian Ma Zhao, quoted by The Financial Times, said that recent renovations to the memorial point to a clear flare-up of anti-American sentiment. Chaguans David Rennie traveled to Dandong and reported on how revisions to Korean War historiography reflect Chinese leaders changing world views:

The new memorial in Dandong charges America with crimes against international law in a single display panel, offering few details. A glass case offers supposed evidence: an old bomb casing, and dusty test-tubes containing bacteria-carrying insects scattered by the us forces. In reality the tale was long ago debunked, notably by documents that emerged from Soviet archives decades after the war. The papers included a resolution by the Soviet government in 1953 that called reports of American germ warfare in Korea fictitious. A study by Milton Leitenberg for the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington cites memoirs by Wu Zhili, a former head of Chinas military medical service in Korea. Wu called talk of germ warfare a false alarm that did not make sense: some alleged drop-zones were just metres from American lines, and the winter weather was far too cold for bacteriological warfare.

Cheerful souls might conclude that modern Chinas rulers are embarrassed by this old propaganda but cannot easily disown it, so are taking a middle path. Chaguan draws a different lesson from a recent visit to the memorial. The new museum may tone down its anti-Americanism, eschewing the previous memorials statements about American imperialism being exposed as a paper tiger. But in its place is something that may prove just as disruptive: a deep disdain for the West, which is portrayed as unable to match the efficiency and order of Communist Party rule. Indeed, Americas germ-warfare campaign is called a military failure, thanks to clever Chinese and North Korean anti-epidemic work. [Source]

As part of the Chinese governments campaign to revisit and rethink the Korean War, CCTV released a 20-episode documentary series on the conflict.

Although there might have been noticeably little mention of North Korea in the Chinese state-television documentary, Global Times covered North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns tribute to Mao Anying, Mao Zedongs son, who was killed in a bombing raid while serving in the Chinese army.

Chinas online nationalists criticized the ber-popular South Korean boy band BTS for eliding mention of Chinese war dead during a ceremony commemorating the war. China and South Korea fought on opposite sides of the war and although a truce has been reached the war is, technically, not over. BTS, like all South Korean K-pop groups, is banned from performing in China but nonetheless remains extremely popular. Although some Chinese netizens called for a boycott of all BTS goods, no such large-scale boycott has yet emerged. A Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson even clarified that BTS merchandise has not been banned by Chinese customs.

In Foreign Policy, S. Nathan Park wrote on the boycott that never materialized:

The PRC proved no match for ARMY. When the K-pop superstar group BTS acknowledged the shared sacrifice of Americans and Koreans as they received the Korea Societys James A. Van Fleet Award, named after a U.S. general during the Korean War, Chinese social media roiled with outrage, perceiving BTSs message to be a slight against Chinese soldiers in the war. The Global Times, Chinas state-owned tabloid, blasted the group for its one-sided attitude that negated history. Online stores began pulling BTS-related product, anticipating the kind of nationalist frenzy that has cost giant franchises like the NBA and the South Korean supermarket store Lotte hundreds of millions of dollars in the past.

But Chinas media offensive against the kings of K-pop barely lasted two days. Global Times quietly deleted some of its articles criticizing BTS, and the negativity against the group in Chinese social media also faded quickly. Some Chinese fans call for a boycott hardly made a dent on BTS, supported by their worldwide fan club ARMY (which stands for Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth, if you were wondering). Shortly after they received the Van Fleet Award, BTS became one of only five music groups in history to seize the top two spots simultaneously on Billboards Hot 100 songs chart, joining the Beatles and Bee Gees among others. Last weeks initial public offering of Big Hit Entertainment, BTSs production company, was among the most successful IPOs in the history of the Korean stock market as its share price nearly doubled on the first day. [Source]

In 1950, American President Harry Truman stationed an aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait, preventing a PLA invasion of Taiwan. At South China Morning Post, Minnie Chan reported on how memories of the Korean War shape mainland opinions on war with Taiwan:

After returning to Beijing in 1954, Zhang, an English translator and negotiator for the PVA, was classified as a betrayer, dismissed from the PLA and expelled by the party. It was not until 1981 that he was rehabilitated.

The struggle over Taiwan remains a central issue in his reflections of the Korean conflict.

In 2013, Zhang wrote an article, saying he felt relieved after realising the Korean war had avoided a fratricidal fight between Chinese people on the mainland and in Taiwan.

But this month, Zhang told the South China Morning Post he supported actions by the PLA to accomplish Taiwan reunification because he was angry hearing that some Taiwanese refused to recognise they were Chinese. [Source]

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. Some instructions are issued by local authorities or to specific sectors, and may not apply universally across China. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. SeeCDTs collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truthsince 2011.

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Minitrue: Commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the War to Resist America and Aid Korea - China Digital Times

This article is part of a series called How to Human, interviews with memoirists that explore how we tackle lifes alarms, marvels and bombshells.

A few years ago, Nicholson Baker was doing research for his book about the destruction of newspapers by libraries in a library when he came upon a book about Americas use of biological weapons. The authors of the book spent years trying to prove that the United States had conducted biological warfare during the Korean War, including the dropping of insects tainted by disease. It was all horrifying stuff not taught in history class, and Baker was shocked.

How could it be that the United States was doing such terrible things? Its the question that drove him to research and write Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, which comes out Tuesday.

Researching the book sent him into a warren of government tunnels in search of documents that proved America was guilty of developing and using biological weapons. He used the Freedom of Information Act to acquire such documents, but the government wasnt always compliant in getting them back to him. Indeed he received many pieces of paper with redacted words, sentences and paragraphs, sometimes in black rectangles, other times in white, depending on the government agencys preference. This led him to file more FOIA requests in which hed ask for the redacted words to be revealed.

He still has FOIAs out there waiting to be returned to him, and he could be waiting decades more. Since life moves a lot faster than the government, Baker found a way to tell the story now. He decided to keep a diary in which he could spend several weeks writing what he learned. Isnt that what historians do? They sit down to write what they know based off of the evidence they have on hand.

In the end, he is now on a quixotic mission, hoping the government will declassify everything older than 50 years old. He believes, If we could learn from our mistakes and our successes, then I think we can maybe move forward about things that are happening right now.

HuiffPost spoke with Baker via a Google Hangout and FaceTime earlier in July. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

Would you describe what FOIA is and how it came to be?

FOIA [pronounced FOY-a] stands for the Freedom of Information Act, and its a glorious law that took a long time to come into being. It was something dreamed up by congressman John Moss. He had this idea in the middle of the 1950s that there was too much that was happening in the federal government that was not knowable. You cant have consent of the governed unless the governed know whats actually happening.

He started this long process, and he had hearings, and he had resistance. The Justice Department didnt like the idea and the newspapers did like the idea. It took him 10 years, and finally in 1965 this act came in. It said that anybody can ask to see anything; they have to put it in writing, and then in 20 days, that particular agency has to give some kind of response.

It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and he did not want to sign it, but it had to be signed. It had some ups and downs; there was a moment where it was very powerful, where suddenly it dislodged a lot of things that had happened in the 50s. Suddenly people thought, Oh my God, you did that? Then the Reagan administration changed the rules radically, and said that the CIAs operational files this was specifically about the CIA were going to be off limits. That meant basically all the stuff that is actually interesting that the CIA does, you werent going to be able to learn anything about it. Operations just means secret, sneaky, clandestine things that people do in other countries, that kind of thing.

Theres been ups and downs over the years, and gradually its gotten harder and harder to get things from federal agencies. Basically whats happened is that government agencies want to shield themselves from scrutiny.

I fully understand that, they want some privacy to do whatever they want to do. What is driving this book is that they want to keep private, keep secret stuff that happened 60 or 70 years ago, so long ago that its of historical interest and importance, but cannot possibly affect national security.

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, by Nicholson Baker

What was your goal for this book?

It took a lot of work to write this book; I put my heart and soul and liver and onions into it, and Im just hoping that it could lead to a kind of decision, a blanket decision to declassify everything thats over 50 years everything, just everything.

Just let people see what the government was doing, at least that. Thats the beginning, because if we could learn from our mistakes and our successes, then I think we can maybe move forward about things that are happening right now.

Toward the end of your book you describe a deep frustration in one of your diary entries, and you say you want to sue the American government, that if you could be armed with $20 million, youd be able to open everything up.

Yeah, I have these fantasies. I successfully, oddly enough, sued the San Francisco Public Library, because they didnt want to release the list of the books that theyd gotten rid of. They got rid of about a quarter of a million books when they moved to a new library, and the librarians came to me and said that this was a really strange, secret thing that happened. I put in a Freedom of Information request, and they said no, so I then found a lawyer, a Freedom of Information lawyer who did it pro bono, and they released the list.

I just think that it would be so great to sue the federal government and then use $20 million to scan everything that was released to the National Archives. Everything older than 50 years, just start scanning it and do it. It actually would be a nice employment project because youd have people coming in. It would be a WPA kind of effort to say, Were going to be able to look at our own countrys history.

Could you describe the main theme of the book, and what you were trying to uncover?

There are two things that interested me. One was I wanted to know what happened in a fraught time in the past, so theres that, but then I also wanted to know how people actually truthfully think about history. Thats why I wrote it as a diary. When you get up in the morning and youre trying to write the history of anything, maybe its of the Bronx in 1910 or something, you also have to eat a bowl of cereal and talk to your wife or husband, or students if youre a teacher, I mean, you have a whole life.

What was the spark that made you want to go looking for biological warfare?

It came out of the book I wrote about libraries. I was at the University of New Hampshire library; I was in the middle of writing this book about the fact that there had been a complete clean-out of beautiful newspapers and a replacement of them with microfilm, and there was this book on the shelf that was by these two guys, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, and it had a pink fly on the cover it was really kind of a lurid cover: it said, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.

Now, I dont know anything about that at this point. Im standing there, I pull the thing down, thinking, Well, Ive been reading about all this weird Cold War stuff in connection with this library, so let me just get a little bit up to speed on the Cold War. I started looking at it, and there were lists of the diseases that the United States government thought were important to study and to intensify and to find ways to put into bombs and figure out how to make them more virulent.

I was really troubled, but also then I saw on this list, it was this list of diseases, and one of them was coccidioidomycosis, which is a very long word that I still dont really know how to spell. My grandfather was a pathologist and he studied coccidioidomycosis because its a fungal disease, and he was a fungal disease pathologist and thought, By God, I know that disease. I cannot believe that the American military wants to make people sick with this horrible disease that gets in peoples lungs and gives them lesions, its a very slow-acting disease.

I just thought I want to know more about this. I read this book, and I liked these guys on paper. They had managed to declassify huge amounts of stuff, because it was in a sort of golden age of declassification in the 80s, and I just thought, They have done a real service to American history to open it all up. I started reading reviews of their books, and the reviews were savage. It was amazing, they said it was shoddy scholarship, that these people have besmirched the historical profession, and their claim was that there was a gigantic germ warfare development program that was paid for by the Army and the Air Force, and that possibly the Americans had done what the Chinese and North Koreans said, and actually had dropped disease weapons on them.

That was the controversial thing. Most of the book is about the machinery of weapons research, and they do a beautiful job of that, and its fascinating. What people didnt like was the idea that these two men from Canada were charging that the United States had actually done this.

Anyway, I wrote a bunch of different books, and somewhere along the way I thought, I really want to just really get to the bottom of this story, because the two of them seemed a little bit like wounded men. They had worked on a book for close to 10 years, and it came out and every single person trashed it. I thought, Thats not fair. This book is a piece of institutional history of something. I just thought I would try to find out what actually happened, and I did.

When you write about some of your FOIA heroes in the book, its almost like youre a sports fan the way you revere them. Could you talk about who are your heroes in that department and what kind of impact theyve had on society?

The FOIA victory a tremendous, huge, ticker-tape parade kind of victory that nobody really knows about was one that just happened fairly recently. It has a long set of people involved, but it basically comes down to MuckRock, a very small, hardy band of really nice people for one thing, but who have set up this mechanism for asking for government documents using their website.

They made a request through a lawyer named Kel McClanahan, who is a very articulate, almost professorial kind of lawyer. But they requested from the CIA to have every bit of this digital database called the CREST databasethat just stands for CIA Records Search Tool.

The CREST database used to reside only in the National Archives in this one room; they had these four chairs, and it was a completely air gap, super secure cluster of terminals. And there was surveillance and your every keystroke was recorded. This CREST database, mind you, was completely what they call sanitized, meaning that the documents had all already been redacted. But in order to use the database, you had to physically go to College Park, Maryland, and sit in this room.

It was really a way of keeping historians from learning about the past. So [MuckRock] said, Give us the whole thing in electronic form. We dont want paper. Just give us the whole thing. Its all been declassified. So were not asking for you to declassify anything further, just give it to us.

And [the CIA] said, No, that would be burdensome and refused because its classified material. So this giant collection of declassified materials suddenly becomes classified material. That didnt make any sense, so the lawyer brought suit and there was this tremendous back and forth where the CIA said it was going to take I think they first said it was going to take 28 years to go through this collection and then they thought about it and said, No, no, itll only take six years, or something like that.

Finally this ex-CIA employee, whom I interviewed, got into it. Hed had a rough time with the CIA, because hed asked while he was [still] employed by the CIA for something controlled by the CIA not a good idea. So he testified that the whole thing could be put on an external $60 Staples drive and the whole process would take a day.

When he did that, the CIA just folded. And suddenly, I dont know if its millions of pages, its an enormous horde of stuff, became publicly available to anyone in the world. This happened in 2017. So just as I was sort of embroiled in one version of this book, a version that failed, suddenly Im typing. Im looking up keywords on the CIAs own website, thinking I should check it, and the words like BW, which stands for biological warfare, or specific diseases, brucellosis and stuff. And suddenly, instead of there being no hits, it suddenly would be lots of hits for crop diseases in the Soviet Union and all kinds of stuff. The thing that was mind-blowing was one of the set of hits was Korean War records, the agency that was the precursor to the National Security Agency.

So all of these people I admire tremendously because they just kept asking and kept asking and kept insisting until they got something. What they got was enormously valuable.

I wonder with everything being shut down, whats going to happen with the backlog of FOIA requests and what the government could be doing to make more documents available digitally.

I think one of the things that really should happen is that the National Archives budget should go up and there should be a more concerted effort to scan a lot of documents. Not throwing away the original documents, of course, but the dream would be that all of World War II records would be scanned and digitally searchable immediately in all kinds of ways we cant even predict.

Our understanding of World War II would be enriched because we would know things about people that are just unfindable, and we would make connections between things. Or World War I, which is really a fascinating era, or the 20s, my God, or the prohibition, all of that. All of that is just waiting to be opened up.

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How America Covered Up Its Germ Warfare Program | HuffPost

Biological weapons. The phrase alone could send chills down the spine. But what are they? How do they work? And are we really at risk? In this Spotlight, we survey their history and potential future.

Sometimes known as germ warfare, biological weapons involve the use of toxins or infectious agents that are biological in origin. This can include bacteria, viruses, or fungi.

These agents are used to incapacitate or kill humans, animals, or plants as part of a war effort.

In effect, biological warfare is using non-human life to disrupt or end human life. Because living organisms can be unpredictable and incredibly resilient, biological weapons are difficult to control, potentially devastating on a global scale, and prohibited globally under numerous treaties.

Of course, treaties and international laws are one thing and humanitys ability to find innovative ways of killing each other is another.

The history of biological warfare is a long one, which makes sense; its deployment can be a lo-fi affair, so there is no need for electrical components, nuclear fusion, or rocket grade titanium, for instance.

An early example takes us back more than 2 and a half millennia: Assyrians infected their enemys wells with a rye ergot fungus, which contains chemicals related to LSD. Consuming the tainted water produced a confused mental state, hallucinations, and, in some cases, death.

In the 1300s, Tartar (Mongol) warriors besieged the Crimean city of Kaffa. During the siege, many Tartars died at the hands of plague, and their lifeless, infected bodies were hurled over the city walls.

Some researchers believe that this tactic may have been responsible for the spread of Black Death plague into Europe. If so, this early use of biological warfare caused the eventual deaths of around 25 million Europeans.

This is a prime example of biological warfares potential scope, unpredictability, and terrifying simplicity.

Moving forward to 1763, the British Army attmped to use smallpox as a weapon against Native Americans at the Siege of Fort Pitt. In an attempt to spread the disease to the locals, the Brits presented blankets from a smallpox hospital as gifts.

Although we now know that this would be a relatively ineffective way to transmit smallpox, the intent was there.

During World War II, many of the parties involved looked into biological warfare with great interest. The Allies built facilities capable of mass producing anthrax spores, brucellosis, and botulism toxins. Thankfully, the war ended before they were used.

It was the Japanese who made the most use of biological weapons during World War II, as among other terrifyingly indiscriminate attacks, the Japanese Army Air Force dropped ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague on Ningbo, China.

The following quote comes from a paper on the history of biological warfare.

[T]he Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. [] Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese had surrendered.

Dr. Friedrich Frischknecht, professor of integrative parasitology, Heidelberg University, Germany

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define bioterrorism as the intentional release of viruses, bacteria, or other germs that can sicken or kill people, livestock, or crops.

This can be achieved in a number of ways, such as: via aerosol sprays; in explosive devices; via food or water; or absorbed or injected into skin.

Because some pathogens are less robust than others, the type of pathogen used will define how it can be deployed.

Utilizing such weapons holds a certain appeal to terrorists; they have the potential to cause great harm, of course, but they are also fairly cheap to produce when compared with missiles or other more hi-tech equipment.

Also, they can be detonated, and, due to the long time that it takes for them to spread and take effect, there is plenty of time for the perpetrator to escape undetected.

Biological weapons can be difficult to control or predict in a battlefield situation, since there is a substantial risk that troops on both sides will be affected. However, if a terrorist is interested in attacking a distant target as a lone operant, bioterrorism carries much less risk to the person.

Experts believe that today, the most likely organism to be used in a bioterrorism attack would be Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax.

It is widely found in nature, easily produced in the laboratory, and survives for a long time in the environment. Also, it is versatile and can be released in powders, sprays, water, or food.

Anthrax has been used before. In 2001, anthrax spores were sent through the United States postal system. In all, 22 people contracted anthrax five of whom died. And, the guilty party was never caught.

Another potential agent of bioterrorism is smallpox, which, unlike anthrax, can spread from person to person. Smallpox is no longer a disease of concern in the natural world because concerted vaccination efforts stamped it out and the last naturally spread case occurred in 1977.

However, if someone were to gain access to the smallpox virus (it is still kept in two laboratories one in the U.S. and one in Russia), it could be an effective weapon, spreading quickly and easily between people.

We have already mentioned the Tartars use of the plague, Yersinia pestis, hundreds of years ago, but some believe that it could be used in the modern world, too. Y. pestis is passed to humans through the bite of a flea that has fed on infected rodents.

Once a human is infected, the resulting disease can either develop into bubonic plague, which is difficult to transmit among humans and fairly easy to treat with antibiotics, or if the infection spreads to the lungs it becomes pneumonic plague, which develops rapidly and does not respond well to antibiotics.

A paper written on the plague and its potential for use in biological terrorism says:

Given the presence and availability of plague around the world, the capacity for mass production and aerosol dissemination, the high fatality rate of pneumonic plague, and the potential for rapid secondary spread, the potential use of plague as a biological weapon is of great concern.

Dr. Stefan Riedel, Department of Pathology, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, TX

As a potentially severe and sometimes deadly gastrointestinal disease, cholera has the potential to be used in bioterrorism. It does not spread easily from person to person, so for it to be effective, it would need to be liberally added to a major water source.

In the past, the bacteria responsible for cholera, Vibrio cholerae, has been weaponized by the U.S., Japan, South Africa, and Iraq, among others.

Some consider tularemia, an infection caused by the Francisella tularensis bacterium, as a potential bioweapon. It causes fever, ulcerations, swelling of lymph glands, and, sometimes, pneumonia.

The bacterium can cause infection by entering through breaks in the skin or by being breathed into the lungs. It is particularly infectious, and only a very small number of organisms (as few as 10) need to enter the body to set off a serious bout of tularemia.

Studied by the Japanese during World War II and stockpiled by the U.S. in the 1960s, F. tularensis is hardy, capable of withstanding low temperatures in water, hay, decaying carcasses, and moist soil for many weeks.

According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness, Aerosol dissemination of F. tularensis in a populated area would be expected to result in the abrupt onset of large numbers of cases of acute, non-specific, febrile illness beginning 3 to 5 days later [], with pleuropneumonitis developing in a significant proportion of cases.

Without antibiotic treatment, the clinical course could progress to respiratory failure, shock, and death.

Those pathogens are an abbreviated selection, of course. Others considered to have potential as biological weapons include brucellosis, Q fever, monkeypox, arboviral encephalitides, viral hemorrhagic fevers, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B.

Although biological weapons are as old as the hills (if not older), modern technology brings new worries. Some experts are concerned about recent advances in gene editing technology.

When utilized for good, the latest tools can work wonders. However as with most cutting-edge technology there is always the potential for misuse.

A gene editing technology called CRISPR has set off alarm bells in the defense community; the technology allows researchers to edit genomes, thereby easily modifying DNA sequences to alter gene function.

In the right hands, this tool has the potential to correct genetic defects and treat disease. In the wrong hands, however, it has the potential for evil.

CRISPR technology is becoming cheaper to run and therefore more accessible to individuals bent on bioterrorism.

A report titled Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, written by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, was published in February 2016. In it, gene editing features in a list of weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.

Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use technology, he explains, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications.

Advances in genome editing in 2015, he continues, have compelled groups of high-profile U.S. and European biologists to question unregulated editing of the human germline (cells that are relevant for reproduction), which might create inheritable genetic changes.

With future generations of CRISPR-like technology and an advanced knowledge of genetics, there would be no theoretical end to the misery that could be caused. Theres potential to create drug-resistant strains of diseases, for instance, or pesticide-protected bugs, capable of wiping out a countrys staple crop.

For now, however, other methods of bioterrorism are much easier and closer to hand, so this is likely to be of little concern for the foreseeable future.

In fact, to lighten the mood at the end of a somewhat heavy article, just remember that anyone who lives in the U.S. today is much more likely to be killed in an animal attack than a terrorist attack biological or otherwise.

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Biological weapons and bioterrorism: Past, present, and future

RUSH: This is Paul in Greensboro, Georgia. Im glad you waited. Its great to have you here with us. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks so much. And youre in my prayers, by the way. Rush, two nights ago Tucker Carlson had a scientist on who worked in the Wuhan lab in China, and she basically stated that this virus was a designed virus. It was not something that was in nature. And I wanted to talk about that. And I dont want to go with the obvious where Google, Facebook, and Twitter censored her, but theres two things very interesting about that interview.

One, she didnt have an answer as to why they would be creating the virus. And the other thing is, Tucker didnt really think about the deeper ramifications if what shes saying is true. The why thing and Ill be very quick the why thing is very obvious. Its a country that has 1.4 billion people to feed, and its struggling to do that. All this urbanization that you see taking place in both China and India is just really another source for the irrigation that comes out of the Himalayan mountains. And Chinas on a buying binge across the globe, buying land across the globe.

So I think theres an obvious answer to the why. But the deeper question also is, if thats true, what the hell else is going on in that lab? If they can create a very specific virus thats tailored to the old, the people that are weak, that have pre-existing conditions, what else are they working on there? Suppose we get a vaccine, which were gonna have very shortly

RUSH: Well, I dont think its that complicated and I dont think there needs to be this much intrigue about it. If what she said is true I saw her interview I fully expect this woman to be disappeared very shortly. The ChiComs will find a way to find out where she is. Im stunned she got out of China. It was thought that she had been disappeared months ago. (interruption) No, I dont mean to be dismissive here. I just think that the ChiComs and the Russians and us, we are working on the old name for this, germ warfare.

We are constantly working on biowarfare. The fact that the Chinese would be doing this is not a surprise. The fact that they might use it as a way to eliminate some of their own population because they cant feed them all and they cant keep them all in the countryside and out of the cities. Theyre communists. Communists kill their own people. None of that would surprise me if thats whats going on. The why of this, if this Chinese scientist is right, is not hard to understand at all. The more troubling aspect here is the reluctance of people who otherwise have common sense to reject this out of hand as an impossibility.

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It Shouldnt Be Shocking to Hear the ChiComs Released the Virus Intentionally - Rush Limbaugh

The great woke reckoning is well upon us as we sit here in 2020. Across the country statues are falling. Schools, roads, and clubs are changing their names so as not to celebrate the noxious evils of the past. Indeed, in a very real sense hindsight is 2020. But there is one region of our sinful nation that has mostly skirted the cancellations. The Northeast, forever the countrys seat of culture and education, has gone through all this more or less unscathed. That should really change, as there are plenty of evildoers being celebrated here even as I write this.

We all know by now that Elihu Yale, namesake of one of our fanciest colleges, had a hand in the human bondage of Africans. It seems odd his name should stay on the expensive degrees handed out there. Not too far away, Amherst College and the town itself are named after Sir Jeffrey Amherst who wrote positively about using smallpox infected blankets as a kind of germ warfare against American Indians.

Even abolitionists like Horace Greeley, who has a school named after him in Chappaqua, New York, the home of the Clintons, was an unabashed racist. He called black people an easy, worthless race, taking no thought for the morrow. That doesnt make for a very nice school motto. How about Peter Stuyvesant whose name and visage bubble up all over Gotham? That guy hated Jews more than Bill de Blasio does. He didnt even want to allow them in New York City.

Speaking of New York City, that very name is problematic. It is dubbed for the Duke of York, later James II of England and James VII of Scotland, who made giant bags of money selling human beings. And John Jay, who has a criminal justice college named after him, was a slaveholder. And we wonder why police are so terrible and racist.

The list goes on and on, and trust me Im not trying to give anyone ideas, but its worth pointing out that in liberal Northeast enclaves people just kind of ignore all of this, after all its not like the confederacy was in the Northeast. This is a very old game in the United States, older than the United States itself, in fact. Even during the time of the revolution southern slave owners pointed out to self-righteous northerners shocked, shocked I tell you, by slavery that the triangle trade of molasses for rum for slaves was making them very wealthy people.

After the Civil War and well into the 20th century Northeasterners would point at the South and say, look at those horrible racists! while conditions for minorities, especially blacks were wholly unequal and blatantly discriminatory up north. Its like the old Jewish joke about a funeral where nobody would say anything about the despised deceased until one guy finally pipes up with Well, he was better than his brother

There is a fair amount of projection going on here in the great progressive Northeast. Instead of tearing down our own history, like that listed above, which we demand from the South, we instead read bestsellers that make us feel bad about ourselves and tell our friends at brunch how bad we feel and how now we are doing the work. It is very clearly a cop out, but one that comes easily to us. After all, we control the media, we control the academy, we manufacture the outrage that consumes everyone but ourselves.

Its time for this to stop, if we are to play this dangerous game of cancellation, which of course we should not, we should at least do it on equal terms. Every person I listed committed sins worthy of cancellation by progressive lights. Its like the Northeast gets a free pass because we were the ones who came up with idea. That should stop. If the South must forfeit its history, then so should we.

But you see that isnt going to happen. None of those people or institutions will be cancelled. For ours is the good and virtuous part of America, its the rest of the country full of racist louts and deplorables. We are aware of our sins and confess and thus may retain our history. There is a word for this and that word is hypocrisy. So the next time someone wants to topple some statue in Alabama the response should be fine, well get right on that. Just as soon as you change the name of New York City. That would put an end to the madness quite quickly.

David Marcus is the Federalist's New York Correspondent. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.

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It's Time For Cancel Culture To Hit The Northeast - The Federalist

We cant stop here, this is bat country! Hunter S. Thompson

It was just your run of the mill Friday afternoon. I was sitting at my desk, finishing another loud-mouthed column for the nation to disregard when my computer let me know that it was time to take a beer break. It does this on occasion by flashing an icon at the top of the screen, saying that it needs a software update. If you ask me, it really only does this to keep me from rewriting the same godforsaken sentence over and over again. But who am I to stand in the way of progress?

Fine by me, I thought. I was getting thirsty anyway.

So I grabbed a homebrew from the fridge and then sat back down while the computer did its thing. Thats when I spotted some spare change showing through a stack of bills and post-it notes. Now, loose change doesnt usually give me a boner. But considering that I havent exactly been raking in the big bucks this summer, it felt like I hit the jackpot. But more curious than finding a couple of quarters was their design. The coins had two bats engraved on the back of them, and they werent just waiting to shapeshift into vampires. It was far stranger than all of that.

From what I could tell, the bats appeared to be getting it on. I know, it didnt seem right to me either, but this is 2020, after all, the year when everything muffed up and weird seems to be going mainstream. So maybe bat sex imagery on tokens of capitalism was part of this new normal. No matter how I inspected the coins, no matter which way I flipped them, turned them or spun them, the figuration was the same: Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, Bat porn! For obvious reasons, this bizarre detail piqued my curiosity and inspired me to dig deeper. However, what I discovered was far more sinister than a couple of horny bats. Come to find out, some people believe the symbolism actually represents the U.S. governments involvement in spreading COVID-19.

Mwahahaha!

There are several conspiracy theories floating around for why in hells holy name the U.S. government branded the new quarter (released in February 2020) with two Samoan fruit bats. While some are more extreme than others, they all center on the idea that COVID-19 is all part of a government plot to infect its own people and whittle down the population.

Sure, there are some who think the virus is actually a bioweapon created by China, perhaps released into the world to wreak havoc on the 2020 presidential election. Its a theory that at least has some bearings. After all, the last thing China wants is another four years of Trumps tariffs, so if it takes sending over a vicious bug that makes the voters either dead or turns them against him, so be it. But theres another group that thinks the bat quarter is actually Uncle Sam being a dick, using symbolism and his dark powers in the basement of the U.S. Mint to show Americans that they are being controlled by germ warfare. The theory is that since Americans are being told the virus came from bats, the government stuck a couple of them on a quarter to taunt the woke.

But come on, why would they want to kill us?

Well, supposedly, it is an effort to get rid of the weak (the sick, inbred, Walmart shoppers, etc.) and contribute to the uprising of a new world order. The rich and powerful have presumably had enough of this impoverished America crap, and they are taking the country back once and for all.

Sounds crazy, right? Sure it does. But then again, this is 2020 an age when asteroids seem to be buzzing the planet almost every month, when UFOs are showing up at a higher frequency than ever, and the cast of Seinfeld keeps dropping dead. So, maybe the theory isnt too far-fetched.

Yet after conducting more research, I found out what was really going on. Although these conspiracy theories are entertaining as hell, the real reason there are bats on quarters isnt to reveal an evil plot. The coins are apparently part of the America the Beautiful Quarters Program. Its an initiative that instructs the Mint to spend the next decade paying homage to national parks or other national sites from each state, the District of Columbia, and all U.S. territories.

The program, which was approved by Congress in 2008, requires the release of five new quarters every year with the final coin to hit circulation sometime in 2021. The new bat design has been in the works since 2019 and is representative of the National Park of American Samoa the only U.S. territory where this bat species is found. Oh yeah, and those bats arent boning each other either. The image is actually a mother hanging in a tree looking after her pup. Jeez, what would Freud have to say about my triple-X interpretation? Probably that I just need to get laid.

But, Mike, its not just a coincidence that these bat quarters came out a month before the bat-bred virus struck the nation down. Well, as much as I enjoy a good conspiracy theory and as much as Im still not convinced that this COVID deal isnt a bioweapon of some sort, its connection to the quarter is a stretch. For starters, theres still no definitive evidence that COVID originated from bats. Chinese researchers found a high probability that the virus came from horseshoe bats, but theres still enough of a dispute to remain skeptical. Its possible the disease manifested in some other animal and evolved over the decades to what it has become today.

It also seems unlikely that the Illuminati or whatever sicko secret society is supposedly behind this conspiracy would use the U.S. Mint to reveal their devious plot to wreck life as we know it. No, Im afraid the bat quarter is just a coin and not some smarmy, coded message suggesting that were all screwed.

But that doesnt mean the virus WASNT scientifically engineered and unleashed into the world to satisfy some organizations wicked agenda. It just means that all of the twisted evils operating in the shadows probably arent going to be revealed on a coin. Or maybe thats the whole trick. I mean, have you ever wondered why theres a pyramid on a dollar bill when there arent any pyramids in the United States? Whats that all about, huh? You know what I think? I think it is a nod to the aliens, the real controllers of planet Earth. Perhaps COVID-19 IS the aliens did you ever think about that? Maybe weve already been invaded, but weve been too programed by the Independence Day imagery created by Hollywood to realize it. Or perhaps this is just me trying to get another humdinger of a conspiracy theory to go viral. Thats up to you to decide.

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Why Are There Bats On The New Quarter? Conspiracy Theorists Think The Government Plot Against Society? - BroBible

It bothers me and lots of Americans, what happened to our great country. I do not know why the current administration is not clearly telling the American people who is responsible for this pandemic.

We only hear that China did all of this.

I was wondering, when all this happened, where was our intelligence community?

The whole world is suffering and people are dying right and left, why isnt there an investigation to find who is responsible for destroying the human race?

People had no experience with this kind of suffering. It is the responsibility of all those countries who have germ warfare labs to completely destroy these machines who are killing people. All these nukes are obsolete.

Now we are entering into a new era. It is in the best interest of all the countries who are making nuclear weapons and these warfare germs to destroy them completely and spend money for the humanity of the world so people can have a better life and clean water to drink.

I am wondering if this coronavirus is a natural disaster or an economic or political game among superpowers. I guess we will never know, as up until now we do not know who killed John F. Kennedy, who did 9/11 and who is doing this corona. I guess we have to live with these conspiracy theories. If this virus is doing human to human transmission, I hope the next virus after corona will not be airborne.

All these economic disasters have to be investigated, and those people or countries responsible should be punished to the fullest extent, so we can all live a normal life.

(Dr. Mohammad Khalid is a Todt Hill resident.)

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Whats next after coronavirus? (letter to the editor) - SILive.com

To my nonscientists eye. Similar caveats we may never have incontrovertible proof, its remotely possible, though perhaps eternally unprovable, we may never know, its at least possible, will we ever know?, let me just blurt out what I think happened, etc. infest Bakers narrative, usually preceded or followed by wild accusations (and, occasionally, by a sign of self-awareness: I lay in bed some of today reading more of this book, hating it, excited by it, embarrassed by it).

At times, the book is framed as a deliberate challenge to the intelligence community: I could be completely wrong. The only way to prove me wrong is by declassifying the entire document. But this is not how a historian proceeds. Again and again, Baker bristles with anger over actions that were seriously contemplated by the C.I.A., other intelligence agencies and the military but never undertaken. I felt trembly and disgusted at the same time, he writes of Operation Sphinx, a proposal to gas millions of Japanese from the air during World War II. Its a horrible and disillusioning thing to know that your own country was passing around a paper like Sphinx in the Pentagon. Really? To know that in a brutal war men thought brutal things?

At another point, he questions the long, interesting, confusing letter he got from Floyd ONeal, one of some 30 captured American airmen and Marines who confessed to germ-warfare bombing in Korea. ONeals confession is surprising and moving, though, whether or not its true, Baker tells us. ONeal recanted completely after he was released, and writes in his letter of sustaining torture so awful he still wont describe it to Baker more than 50 years later: What they did for the next days I dont care to discuss but I finally agreed to sign their confession. There is nothing surprising or moving about a coerced confession, save for ONeals ability to endure the price it exacted.

Baker concedes that Americans individually have done good things, a gesture followed by a banal list that includes sunglasses, topiary, no-hitters and the midcentury New Yorker. Yes, and also little baby ducks and old pickup trucks. This is another affectation of virtue, not a moral argument.

I share Bakers disgust with all the crazy, wasteful, illegal, counterproductive and murderous things the C.I.A. has done, and no doubt continues to do. Hell, I even like dogs. Bakers Olympian worldview, though, takes him to almost the same place he landed in Human Smoke, his paste-up 2008 history of the road to World War II: immobilized by purity and concluding that we should never have intervened, even to stop the Nazis. Americans are neither beasts nor angels, just human beings trying to forge our way through the murky moral choices this world poses. To pretend otherwise is perhaps the worst deception of all.

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Did America Use Bioweapons in Korea? Nicholson Baker Tried to Find Out - The New York Times

Representational image. | Image Courtesy: UZreport.uz

When we think of epidemics, smallpox comes to mind, but we remember it as a disease which was successfully eradicated by a vaccine; but it was also a virus used as a weapon for biological warfare 33 years before the vaccine was invented.

In India, we have grown up listening to stories of dreaded diseases and every family has a memory of some epidemic or the other. The most dreaded was the smallpox, a disease for which the only cure seemed to be desperate prayers to Sheetla Mata, the goddess of smallpox'.

Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases known to humans and it affected people around the globe. But the history of smallpox holds a unique place in the history of medical sciences; it is the only human disease to have been eradicated by vaccination.

The smallpox vaccine was the first successful vaccine to be developed. It was introduced by Edward Jenner (1749-1823. He observed that milkmaids, who previously had caught cowpox, did not catch smallpox.

The global eradication effort initially used a strategy of mass vaccination campaigns to achieve 80% vaccine coverage in each country, and thereafter by case-finding, followed by ring vaccination of all known and possible contacts to seal off the outbreak from the rest of the population.

The vaccine was discovered in 1796 and in 1980 the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that the disease had been successfully eradicated from the world.

While so much effort had gone into the eradication of the dreaded disease, there were some people who saw the smallpox as a weapon for war; a weapon to defeat their enemies. In other words, smallpox was used as a biological weapon.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of the British forces in North America, deliberately used smallpox to diminish the native American population hostile to the British. An outbreak of smallpox in Fort Pitt provided Amherst with the means to execute his plan. On June 24, 1763, Captain Ecuyer, one of Amhersts subordinate officers, gifted the Native Americans with smallpox-infected blankets from the smallpox hospital. He recorded in his journal: I hope it will have the desired effect. As a result, a large outbreak of smallpox occurred among the Native American tribes in the Ohio River Valley.

This was not the first use of a biological weapon in history and unfortunately not the last.

Biological warfare (BW)also known as germ warfarehas been defined as the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. The use of biological weapons is prohibited under customary international humanitarian law, as well as several international treaties. The use of biological agents in armed conflict is a war crime.

Biological warfare was banned by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The Convention was the result of prolonged efforts by the international community to establish a new instrument that would supplement the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use but not possession or development of chemical and biological weapons.

The same year the Convention was passed by the United Nations, a young scientist-turned-journalist by the name of Dr K S Jayaraman (born 1936) read about some strange experiments on mosquito control being conducted in villages outside Delhi.

When Jayaraman contacted Rajendra Pal in WHO about the project since the international organisation was associated with it, he was told that there were orders from the WHO Director-General not to discuss the project with the Indian press. Dr. Pal showed Jayaraman a confidential letter addressed to Mr. Willard at WHO regional office in Delhi which said the project is considered sensitive to the Indian Press.

Jayaraman left the room, telling Dr. Pal that under these conditions, he could only write what he knew and the WHO Director-Generals injunction to keep Genetic Control Mosquito Unit (GCMU) out of the Indian press.

At this point Dr. Pal invited the correspondent back again and agreed to an interview. The interview ended with the first question of Jayaraman, namely, the reason why GCMU was studying yellow fever mosquitoes instead of malarial mosquitoes. As everyone knows, India does not have yellow fever.

Jayaraman was the science correspondent for the Press Trust of India, which was headed at the time by the formidable C Raghavan. I remember clearly that Raghavan had come to see my father, who had just retired from the Prime Ministers Office, to tell him about these experiments.

A Google search revealed that the New Scientist of October 9, 1975, carried a news report with a headline: Germ War allegations force WHO out of Indian mosquito project

The report stated: The PAC report declares that the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Research Unit (GCMRU) project has been ill conceived and is of no utility whatsoever to India. It does, however, have a vital and direct bearing on biological warfare or is likely that the ultimate and only beneficiary of the GLMO experiment is the US machine.

However, the original PAC reports cannot be found on the internet so I wrote to Raghavan, now more than 90 years old, to ask whether my memory was right and he had indeed told my father about these bizarre experiments.

We did some extensive investigations - the PTI Science Correspondent, K.S.Jayaraman, and I - and did an expose of several foreign-funded "research" activities in India, most US-funded (PL-480 funds), and with some military significance, including biological warfare. We were denounced in Parliament by Health Minister Karan Singh, but inquiries by two Public Accounts Committees, vindicated us. I am attaching summary of their findings.

The PAC report is very lengthy but the first paragraph of the Conclusions shows how extensive were the experiments which were being conducted and how many institutions were involved in the projects under the auspices of the WHO.

7.1.1. The examination by the Committee of some of the research projects in the country conducted in collaboration with foreign organisations raise a number of interesting questions. The Committee find that the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Unit Project, the bird migration and arbovirus studies at the Bombay Natural History Society, the Ultra Low Volume Spray experiments for Urban malaria control at Jodhpur, the Pantnagar Microbial Pesticides Project and some of the research projects undertaken in West Bengal and Nargwal in collaboration with the John Hopkins University establish beyond doubt a definite pattern. This is that agencies of foreign governments, in some cases explicitly military agencies of those governments (as in the case of the collaboration between the Bombay Natural History Society and the Miugratory Animal Pathological Survey - MAPS - of the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology have been conducting basic research through Indian scientists and Indian scientific organisations.

Even in cases where such research is carried out in collaboration with philanthropic civilian organisations from abroad, the Committee find that some of these civilian organisations also have active liaison and communication at several levels with military agencies. No doubt, some of these research programmes have been shown as developmental or basic research. These projects, however, have been closely concerned with the collection of vital viral, epidemiological or ecological data, which are well capable of being used against the security of the country and that of our neighbouring countries.

The utility of some of these projects to India, especially the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Unit project seems to be only doubtful or potential, whereas the primary data obtained from these projects are likely to be of vital importance to foreign governments interested in developing techniques of chemical, biological, bacteriological, herbicdal and anti-subversive warfare.

These revelations exposed the Ministry of Healths complicity in these projects. The Minister of Health at the time was Karan Singh.

Among the documents Raghavan sent to me was a letter from Jyotirmoy Basu (CPI(M) Member of Parliament) to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi which was an annexure to the PAC report.

Letter from PAC Chairman, Jyotirmoy Basu, to Prime Minister of India, vide para 2 above (PAC167-p225)

New Delhi, 31st January, 1975

Dear Mrs. Gandhi

The G.C.M.U. Programme has given rise to serious suspicion in my mind. I have tried to collect information from various unconnected sources and I have come to the conclusion that this programme has been financed by P.L.480 for execution through WHO and is primarily meant for the three things mentioned below:

(1) To carry on certain experiments in India which are harmful to the population and which are not allowed to be done in their own country i.e. U.S.A.

(2) They are experimenting and keeping things in readiness in case the U.S.A. Government ever wanted to wage a chemical, bacteriological or virus warfare against this country.

(3) To prepare themselves to wage a chemical, bacteriological or virus warfare against another country keeping India as base.

The agreement between P.L.480 Fund Administrator and W.H.O. has expired on 31 December 1974. In spite of that this is continuing and out of these experiments all the results and findings will be the property of U.S. Government. To make sure that this does not progress any more, I am writing this because I am very apprehensive of this programme and I am doing in the best interests of the country and the people.

I earnestly suggest that a thorough probe should be done by the most competent Intelligence Agency at your command.

Yours sincerely,

(Jyotirmoy Basu)

Mrs. Indira Gandhi

Prime Minister of India

New Delhi.

Because of the timely intervention and persistence of several journalists, including Raghavan and Jayaraman, the projects were wound up. But research in biological warfare, no doubt, continues and the threat it poses is greater today than it was in 1975.

There have been many conspiracy theories suggesting that the novel coronavirus is linked to biological warfare. There are many conspiracy theories, some even link US tech magnate Bill Gates to having an interest in the spread of the virus. A briefing prepared for the European Parliament in April 2020 alleged that Russia and China are driving parallel information campaigns, conveying the overall message that democratic state actors are failing and that European citizens cannot trust their health systems.... to undermine democratic debate.

The report comes as Hungary an EU member state faces criticism for preparing a national survey that includes a question on a coronavirus crisis proposal by investor George Soros that experts say will force nations into debt slavery.

In the national consultation due to be mailed to all Hungarian citizens, the government asks whether people should reject George Soross plan, which would in-debt our homeland for an unforeseeable long time.

According to Rasem 'Abidat, an activist of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a columnist for the Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, based in East Jerusalem, the coronavirus is a biological weapon that the US and Israel decided to employ against China and Iran after failing to harm them by conventional means.

At this stage we do not know if any of these claims have any truth. But we do know that it is a pathogen dispersed globally though free trade and international travel. But this we do know that even if the pandemics effect on the world isnt a conventional attack on government targets or the military, its a widespread and indiscriminate attack on global citizens and the economy. This outbreak has directly impacted the lives of billions of people, making it the most effective model for future terrorist activities and a new model for circumventing the conventions of modern warfare.

Governments across the globe are using the pandemic to lower labour standards, wipe out human rights of millions of people and mobilising fear to equip themselves with powers of control and surveillance over entire population. The vaccine, when it comes, will have no way to protect us against the authoritarian measures put in place by democratic governments.

Nandita Haksaris a human rights lawyer, teacher, campaigner and writer. The views are personal.

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The Politics of Pandemics - NewsClick

What about this are we missing?

Does anyone in his right mind think were going to unleash our children upon each other in two-hour contests of germ warfare? Were going to let high school and college students slam into each other in a toxic cocktail of sweat, blood and spit and pretend its safe?

Stop it. Its not happening. Were better than this.

In Missouri, where parents and youth coaches have thrown their kids back onto playing fields, health officials now say a rise in coronavirus cases among youth aged 10 to 19 is the primary source of COVID-19 spreading into the community.

Colleges from Chapel Hill to Clemson to Alabama and yes, LSU, are reporting shocking numbers of positive cases among football players. And at fraternities across the South and in college bars across the country, outbreaks are being reported every day.

All this before the students even return to campus.

We seem frozen by an inability to do the right thing.

Its time the adults started acting like adults.

The NFL seems hell-bent on its players playing the role of guinea pigs if not lemmings, willing to die if not kill, to play football. We know what thats about, and it has nothing to do with the health and welfare of the workers.

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Ed Hardin: Get ready to face that football isn't happening this fall - Roanoke Times