Plagues

We are, as I write, in April 2020 involved in a worldwide pandemic, a major disruption of life, one that has killed thousands. It makes sense to ask about causes of this one, Coronavirus as well as others past and future. The Black Death killed around half the population of Europe circa 1347 to 1351. It is thought to have come from China or that general area brought by traders to Genoa and thence on throughout Europe. Now we have our current problem and know where is came from; not merely from China but from Wuhan and from the wet market there.

The fact that the Wuhan Institute Of Virology is there is almost certainly a Red Herring but it did give them a head start in dealing with it.

David Cole, a Jew writing for Takimag takes a position on the whole business - see Speak the Truth, Shame the Chinese. He makes sense; he also makes the connection between Severe acute respiratory syndrome [ SARS ] and China. H1N1 seems to have had a different origin.

 

Speak the Truth, Shame the Chinese     
QUOTE
Well, I’ll be damned; the Chinese are now encouraging “cultural appropriation”! After telling whites that they can’t cook “Asian” food or open “Asian” restaurants or wear “Asian” clothes, because everything that comes from Asia belongs to Asians only, the Chinese are now willingly surrendering credit for the COVID-19 virus, even though it came from China as the by-product of specifically Chinese customs.

Sorry, pallies. You want ownership of the pot sticker, you get ownership of COVID.

There are times to avoid pointing fingers, and there are times to point them so vigorously that you put someone’s eye out. So let’s do some pointin’.

COVID-19 is zoonotic, meaning it jumped from animals (in this case, bats) to humans. You’re going to hear a lot of media propagandists claim that “we don’t know the origin of the virus.” That’s pure obfuscation. True, we don’t know how bats originally acquired the virus in the wild. But that’s not the issue; the issue is how the virus jumped to humans (a “zoonotic spillover”). And regarding that “jump,” we know exactly where it happened: at a Wuhan “wet market” where exotic animals are sold for food in the most appallingly unclean conditions. That’s where the “jump” occurred.

Officially, COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2. As the name implies, COVID-19 is a relative of another coronavirus, SARS. Remember SARS? It was all the rage in 2003. SARS also did the zoonotic jump to people through the Chinese wet markets. And back in the early 2000s, the media was willing to say so. “SARS was not an isolated outbreak,” reported CNN in 2005. “South China has long been the epicenter of pandemic flus, giving birth to three or four global outbreaks a century.”

And why?

South China offers the most exotic fare from all over the globe—by some accounts at least 60 species can be found in any one market—thrusting together microorganisms, animals and humans who normally would never meet. This thriving trade gives the manufacturing hub that straddles the Pearl River Delta the unenviable title of being the “petri dish” of the world.

In an attempt to control the SARS outbreak, the Chinese government tried to stem the trade and consumption of exotic animals. But again and again, the people of China said no. This bears repeating: The Chinese government acknowledged that the SARS “jump” happened because of the wet markets, and those markets were closed…until the Chinese people brought them back.

“COVID-19 is the most predictable calamity in modern history.”

As Jacques deLisle, director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at UPenn, wrote in 2004:

As the SARS crisis came under control, measures to stem the consumption of civets and other wild animals showed signs of eroding once the intense international scrutiny that proponents credited for their adoption began to abate. A hotly debated Guangdong provincial draft law omitted a ban on consumption of wild animals (beyond mere exhortations not to eat them), and a proposed provision prescribing a ban included no penalties. Reports of the reopening of exotic animal markets, the return of wild animals to menus, and amendments to relax regulatory restrictions became commonplace.

At a 2003 Brookings Institution conference on SARS, Newsday’s science correspondent Laurie Garrett observed:

There was a survey done—50% of responders China-wide said that they do occasionally eat exotic animals. So if you have something that is that entrenched in the diet and the cuisine and the tradition and the culture, I don’t think that any regulation is going to make the actual trade in these animals disappear. If anything, it could drive them further underground and make it harder for public health authorities to have any idea what’s going on. So I don’t think that China has come up with an answer on how to stop zoonosis.

Garrett was incorrect. China knew exactly how to “stop zoonosis.” The government simply lacked the will to fight its citizenry on the issue.

In 2003, the CDC’s Daniel DeNoon made the following prediction: “Will SARS come back? Experts agree only on this: It won’t be the last worldwide killer epidemic.” DeNoon quoted the WHO as saying that this future “killer epidemic” is “especially” inevitable because “in China there has been no attempt to segregate exotic animals in the marketplace. These animals have been allowed back into the markets and are still a threat.”

The timeline is important. SARS became a global menace in 2003. The Chinese government attempted to end the wildlife markets that year…and that same year, the markets came back. Literally, the Chinese couldn’t go four months without their filthy, disease-spreading fare. In fact, the return of the wet markets in 2003, while the world was still struggling with SARS, surprised even the China-friendly WHO. As Science magazine reported in August ’03:

The lifting of a 4-month ban on civets and 53 other species of wild animals delighted gourmets in Guangdong Province, where the local cuisine relies on a variety of wild animals. But it came as a surprise to the World Health Organization, which has a team of experts working with its Chinese counterparts investigating a possible animal reservoir of SARS.

As world health officials were trying to curb SARS, the locals were inviting it. “Chinese Diners Shrug Off SARS: Bring On the Civet Cat.” That’s a New York Times headline from December 2003:

It was lunch hour at The First Village of Wild Food, and if anyone in the restaurant was worried that SARS might again be spreading in this city, they were not showing it. Huang Sheng was more worried about which of the small animals in black metal cages would become his midday meal. Asked if he worried about eating wild game in light of SARS, Mr. Huang said he saw no risk. “It’s no big deal. It’s not a problem.” He said Guangdong Province residents had a reputation for eating exotic foods, a taste not even SARS could deter.

Not even SARS could deter. Nor the threat of the next “killer epidemic.” Nor the words of experts like the University of Hong Kong’s Moira Chan‐Yeung, who in November 2003 addressed this message to the people of China: “Abandoning the widespread use of exotic animals as food or traditional medicine and the practice of central slaughtering of livestock and fowl will decrease the chance of viruses jumping from animals to humans.” Around the same time, Nature magazine’s Asia-Pacific correspondent David Cyranoski rhetorically asked, “Why does this region keep throwing up viruses that have the potential to threaten the lives of people around the world?” The answer? “The southern Chinese widespread use of wild species for food and traditional medicine.”

As the Chinese people fought for their right to spread zoonotic diseases, Chinese activists fought to keep the West from noticing. Victor Wong of the Vancouver Association of Chinese Canadians gave a talk in May 2003 in which he downplayed the need to take SARS seriously: “I contrast SARS with the fact that thousands die from influenza every year in Canada. Around the world, millions die from tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS.” He urged an end to “wall-to-wall coverage of Asians wearing masks, patients being wheeled away on stretchers, health officials in moon-suits” because such stories “only serve to fuel more public panic.” He demanded that the media stop running stories with a “negative message” about how “the Chinese eat exotic wild animals.” Finally, he stressed the need to study not the disease but the “trauma” the coverage inflicts upon the Chinese.

In January 2004, SARS reappeared in China. The wildlife market ban was repealed in August 2003, and five months later, the Chinese had ushered in a new round of the disease. As NBC reported in January ’04, even as the ban was reimposed, wild animals were nevertheless “back on the menu” in Chinese eateries. Many in the Western press treated the return of the wildlife markets as a joke. A January 2004 Slate piece by Wired’s Brendan Koerner stated, “Considered a culinary treat in southern China, the animals are believed to carry the virus that causes SARS. What’s a civet cat, what’s the best way to cook one, and what do they taste like?” Yes, Koerner provided recipes for the disease-carrying animal. I’m sure that seemed hilarious at the time.

In a July 2004 piece about the revocation of the January wet-market ban, the L.A. Times wondered “whether the virus for another potential outbreak might be lurking somewhere else in the Chinese diet.” However, the WHO, which had been against the ban’s August 2003 repeal, by July 2004 had “mysteriously” come around to the Chinese way of thinking, supporting the new repeal. The organization’s SARS “team leader” Julie Hall told the Times, “We have to keep an open mind. We may not eat dogs or cats, but we do eat raw oysters. We just shouldn’t pass judgment.”

The World Health Organization’s SARS leader literally said “we shouldn’t pass judgment” on the behavior that causes SARS. That’s like an oncologist refusing to pass judgment on smoking. It’s malpractice soaked in racial whataboutism (“Whites eat crazy things too!”).

By 2007, with the WHO no longer “passing judgment” and with the wet-market ban long gone, Reuters reported that “exotic wildlife and squalor have returned to the Qingping market, making health officials worried that another killer virus could emerge. Traditional wet markets still account for the bulk of fresh food sales in China, where diners hope exotic meats will bring good fortune.” Taiwanese health official Li Jib-heng direly predicted that “a new disease could emerge from close contact with sick wild animals.”

Even some Chinese officials were willing to publicly voice their concerns:

“It seems that some people are determined to start eating civet cats again since no new SARS cases have been reported over the past two years in Guangdong Province. It’s a very dangerous sign,” said Huang Fei, deputy director of the Guangdong Health Department. (‘China Daily,’ 2/14/07)

That same year, Guo-ping Zhao of the Chinese National Human Genome Center in Shanghai unequivocally stated in a paper for the Royal Society that a “ban on wild-game animal markets” would practically guarantee “no further naturally acquired human cases.”

The Chinese knew a ban would work, but they allowed the markets to thrive.

In 2013, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post disclosed that a new Chinese zoonotic pandemic was likely: “Scientists warn of more serious disease threats than SARS.”

A survey that year by Beijing’s Horizon Research Consultancy Group showed that in Guangzhou, 83.3% of residents ate exotic animals.

The Chinese people were living in stubborn, arrogant denial, and the WHO had fallen silent because only racists “pass judgment” on Chinese zoonotic practices.

And now we have COVID-19, which has disrupted the entire world. One-third of the earth’s population is under some sort of lockdown. Livelihoods are ruined, economies destroyed, hundreds of thousands are ill and tens of thousands are dead. And the Chinese government, the Chinese diaspora, the political left, and the media want you to forget how COVID grew from the willful failure of China to learn the lessons of SARS.

So let’s not forget.

Remember that COVID-19, like SARS, began because of specifically Chinese customs, practices, and fetishes.

Remember that during and after the SARS outbreak, the Chinese knew that the wet markets were a danger, yet they were allowed to prosper.

Remember that experts predicted that a bigger, badder SARS would eventually be born from the wet markets. COVID-19 is the most predictable calamity in modern history.

And remember that a ban on Chinese wet markets would have prevented COVID-19. This was the most preventable calamity in modern history.

If we allow anything—fear of “racism,” hatred of Trump, lucrative Chinese business dealings—to get in the way of halting those wet markets for good this time, it’s a certainty that eventually we’ll see an even worse pandemic. There can be no soft feelings here, no sensitivity, no diplomacy. The Chinese must be cajoled, shamed, ridiculed, banned, and threatened until they stop risking the lives of every human on earth because they love eating things that shouldn’t be eaten.

The Chinese don’t deserve hugs; they’re lucky that most of us are civilized enough to not take violent revenge for what they’ve wrought. They should count their blessings that they can still walk among us unmolested. But they shouldn’t mistake our civility for forgiveness.

They have the power to shut the sky…and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they wish. I’m not a religious man, but that line from Revelation seems appropriate. The Chinese have shut the world with their latest plague.

We need to make sure it’s their last.
UNQUOTE
Do they need these strange animals as food? No, but it is something of a habit. The idea that the Chinese government is tolerating their funny little ways is strange. They are the thugs who brought us the
1989 Tiananmen Square protests with hundreds or thousands dead and maybe millions of prisoners in the Xinjiang re-education camps.

 

Black Death ex Wiki     
The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence and the Plague,[a] was the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, resulting in the deaths of up to 75-200 million[1][2][3][4][better source needed] people in Eurasia and North Africa,[5] peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351. Plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is believed to have been the cause; Y. pestis infection can cause septicaemic and pneumonic plagues but most commonly results in bubonic plague.[6] The Black Death was the second plague pandemic recorded, after the Plague of Justinian (542-546).[7] The plague created religious, social, and economic upheavals, with profound effects on the course of European history.

The Black Death probably originated in Central Asia or East Asia,[8][9][10][11][12] from where it travelled along the Silk Road, reaching Crimea by 1347. From there, it was most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats that travelled on Genoese merchant ships, spreading throughout the Mediterranean Basin and reaching Africa, Western Asia, and the rest of Europe via Constantinople, Sicily, and the Italian Peninsula.

The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.[13] In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century.[14] It took 200 years for Europe's population to recover to its previous level.[15] Outbreaks of the plague recurred until the early 20th century.

 

Severe acute respiratory syndrome ex Wiki         
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory disease of zoonotic origin that surfaced in the early 2000s caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1), the first-identified strain of the SARS coronavirus species severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (SARSr-CoV). In late 2017, Chinese scientists traced the virus through the intermediary of civets to cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan province.[2] No cases of the first SARS-CoV have been reported worldwide since 2004.[3]

In 2019, a related virus strain, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was discovered. This new strain causes COVID-19, a disease which brought about the ongoing 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic.[4]

 

2009 swine flu pandemic ex Wiki   
The 2009 swine flu pandemic was an influenza pandemic that lasted from January 2009 to August 2010, and the second of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus (the first being the 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic), albeit a new strain. First described in April 2009, the virus appeared to be a new strain of H1N1, which resulted from a previous triple reassortment of bird, swine, and human flu viruses further combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus,[10] leading to the term "swine flu".[11] Some studies estimated that 11 to 21 percent of the global population at the time—or around 700 million to 1.4 billion people (of a total 6.8 billion)—contracted the illness. This was more than the number of people infected by the Spanish flu pandemic,[12][13] but only resulted in about 284,000 (range from 150,000 to 575,000) fatalities for the 2009 pandemic.[14] A follow-up study done in September 2010 showed that the risk of serious illness resulting from the 2009 H1N1 flu was no higher than that of the yearly seasonal flu.[15] For comparison, the WHO estimates that 250,000 to 500,000 people die of seasonal flu annually.[9]

Unlike most strains of influenza, the Pandemic H1N1/09 virus does not disproportionately infect adults older than 60 years; this was an unusual and characteristic feature of the H1N1 pandemic.[16] Even in the case of previously healthy people, a small percentage develop pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This manifests itself as increased breathing difficulty and typically occurs three to six days after initial onset of flu symptoms.[17][18] The pneumonia caused by flu can be either direct viral pneumonia or a secondary bacterial pneumonia. A November 2009 New England Journal of Medicine article recommended that flu patients whose chest X-ray indicates pneumonia receive both antivirals and antibiotics.[19] In particular, it is a warning sign if a child seems to be getting better and then relapses with high fever, as this relapse may be bacterial pneumonia.[20]

 

Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 ex Wiki 
Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 (A/H1N1) is the subtype of influenza A virus that was the most common cause of human influenza (flu) in 2009, and is associated with the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.

It is an orthomyxovirus that contains the glycoproteins haemagglutinin and neuraminidase. For this reason, they are described as H1N1, H1N2 etc. depending on the type of H or N antigens they express with metabolic synergy. Haemagglutinin causes red blood cells to clump together and binds the virus to the infected cell. Neuraminidase is a type of glycoside hydrolase enzyme which helps to move the virus particles through the infected cell and assist in budding from the host cells.[1]

Some strains of H1N1 are endemic in humans and cause a small fraction of all influenza-like illness and a small fraction of all seasonal influenza. H1N1 strains caused a small percentage of all human flu infections in 2004–2005.[2] Other strains of H1N1 are endemic in pigs (swine influenza) and in birds (avian influenza).

In June 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new strain of swine-origin H1N1 as a pandemic. This novel virus spread worldwide and had caused 18,500 laboratory-confirmed deaths with an estimated 151,700 to 575,400 deaths total[3][4] by August of 2010. On 10 August 2010, the World Health Organization declared the H1N1 influenza pandemic over, saying worldwide flu activity had returned to typical seasonal patterns.[5]

 

David Cole ex Metapedia     
David Cole is a Jewish Holocaust revisionist and conservative political activist.

Cole as a Holocaust revisionist is most well-known for in 1992 visiting Auschwitz, posing as a Holocaust believer, and putting some difficult questions to the senior curator of the Auschwitz State Museum. This interview was used in a famous Holocaust revisionist film, which contains admissions such as a claimed genuine homicidal gas chamber, shown to half a million visitors a year, was in fact a "reconstruction". See the "External links" section for a link to this movie.

Cole went into hiding after he was hounded by the self-styled Jewish Defense League, eventually terrorised into a half-hearted and unconvincing recantation in 1998.

After 2013      
He came out of hiding in 2013, revealing that he has been using the name David Stein since 1998 and admitting that his 1998 recantation was fake, telling the Guardian "I haven't changed my views. But I regret I didn't have the facility with language that I have now. I was just a kid." During this period, Cole/Stein became a well-known conservative Republican in Hollywood running the "Republican Party Animals", a social club for Hollywood conservatives.

However, Cole's stated view on the Holocaust was now somewhat similar to the stated Holocaust views of David Irving. He thus argued that mass killings had occurred at some camps, such as at Treblinka. His arguments have been criticized.[1]

See also the article on Holocaust revisionism lite.