Monday - February 17, 2020

spooky

Dean Koontz, prolific author of mystery/thriller/supernatural novels, wrote a book in 1981 about a militarily engineered virus that gets loose in Wuhan China with disastrous results.

In Eye Of Darkness he named the killer bug Wuhan-400.

In another strange coincidence, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses China’s only level four biosafety laboratory, the highest-level classification of labs that study the deadliest viruses, is just 32km from the epicentre of the current coronavirus outbreak. The opening of the maximum-security lab was covered in a 2017 story in the journal Nature, which warned of safety risks in a culture where hierarchy trumps an open culture.

Fringe conspiracy theories that the coronavirus involved in the current outbreak appears to be man-made and likely escaped from the Wuhan virology lab have been circulated, but have been widely debunked. In fact the lab was one of the first to sequence the coronavirus.

Yeah, no. Nice try. Not debunked, just misdirected. While it is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology did sequence this coronavirus, and it is the only BSL-4 “level 4” lab in China, there are TWO virology labs in Wuhan. The WIV is about 20 miles away from the epicenter, but the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention is almost RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from the wet market. Less than 300 yards away. And it is NOT a BSL-4 lab. Nobody seems to know, or have asked, what BSL (biohazard safety level) rating that place has. And they studied bat diseases there, and so on and so on. Researchers bitten, covered with bat pee, 605 live infected “horseshoe” bats on hand, etc.

Still, it’s a helluva coincidence that Koontz wrote this thriller all those years ago. Or maybe not; Wuhan has been known for a very long time to have been a chemical weapons research center for the Japanese during WWII ...

British writer Paul French, who specialises in books about China, says many of the elements around viruses in China relate back to the second world war, which may have been a factor in Koontz’s thinking.

“The Japanese definitely did do chemical weapons research in China, which we mostly associate with Unit 731 in Harbin and northern China. But they also stored chemical weapons in Wuhan – which Japan admitted,” says French.

... so stretching “chemistry” into “organic chemistry” into biologic R&D, aka virology, isn’t that huge a leap, especially for an author with a very active and dark imagination.

And Wuhan is the crossroads of China. Rivers, trains, highways. It’s the perfect location.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/17/2020 at 09:21 PM   
Filed Under: • Health-Medicine •  
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