As increasing evidence emerges of how all questions about the origin of the coronavirus were deliberately derailed by a web of international scientists and at least one reputed medical journal, it is hoped that a thorough investigation will be carried out into Chinese influence-peddling worldwide and how this phenomenon has compromised and corrupted a section of the scientific community and policymakers and other influencers globally. It’s because of this that the Chinese leadership has got away scot-free even after unleashing a deadly virus, which has ravaged humanity by killing millions of people and has destroyed lives and livelihoods.
How did the world let the rogue power, that China is, to become so powerful where it can change the direction of the discourse by exercising its control over certain groups and individuals and thus saving its own skin? The information coming to the public domain is distressful, to say the least, for it exposes how a cabal worked on behalf of China to cast aspersions on all studies and researches that said as far back as January-February 2020 that the virus was man-made. One of the principal targets of such an attack was a group of nine Indian scientists from IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College of the University of Delhi, who in their report titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” had alleged that the virus was laboratory-made and there was no way that it could have occurred naturally. But such was the derision against them that they had to withdraw their paper from an open online platform, where they had published their paper after seven journals refused to publish it.
The paper came to the notice of senior scientists including the reputed Dr. Anthony Fauci, who, however, rejected the Indian scientists’ claim as outlandish. This has to be seen in the context of the letter written by British zoologist Peter Daszak and 26 other scientists, who, as media reports suggest, claimed in the medical journal Lancet around the same time that there was no way that the virus could have been manufactured in a laboratory. The scientists declared that they did not have any conflict of interest in making such a claim, when the truth is that they had all been mobilised by Dr. Dazsak and had some involvement with gain of function research, to turn viruses into lethal weapons of war, which Daszak was spearheading.
In fact, reports suggest that Daszak’s organization, EcoHealth Foundation was using money received from the Pentagon to fund gain of function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Unsurprisingly, Daszak has a vested interest in diverting attention from China. The rot is so deep that it is the same Daszak who was sent by the World Health Organization, along with other scientists to investigate the origin of the virus. Media reports also suggest that Lancet, which is one of the world’s leading medical journals, has strong Chinese connections: this should explain its whitewashing of Chinese Communist sins, apart from the purely political bile that it has been pouring against India and its Prime Minister.
The bottom line is, such is the extent of China’s “influence peddling” that senior scientists and reputed medical journals compromised their integrity by diverting attention from Beijng’s role in the spread of the virus. As a result, till date, we do not know how the virus can be eliminated or what the best practices are to control its spread. This is a huge disservice to humanity and action must be taken against those involved. This requires a serious probe, not just into China’s role, but also into the role played by the scientific community as a whole. They have let down people across the world and will have to pay a price for that.