Covid-19 – shiite for brains and conspiracy theories

(weekend blog)

Two issues around the Covid-19 pandemic in this weekend’s blog

1. Do Shiites have shiite for brains?

I mentioned a few days ago that ‘Iranian scientists’ have analysed the Covid-19 virus and concluded it didn’t come from China at all. According to these ‘scientists’ and their mad ayatollah masters, the Covid-19 virus is actually a biological weapon sent by evil Donald Trump to destroy the Iranian economy. (‘What Iranian economy?’ you might ask)

The shiite for brains Iranian Shiites have admitted that there are 270 Covid-19 cases in Iran and there have been 28 deaths. But most experts believe this is total bollox and the real numbers are many times higher. One whistleblower, for example, claimed that there were 8 Covid-19 deaths during just one shift at the Kamkar Hospital in Tehran. Moreover, the Iranian Vice President, 4 Iranian MPs and the Deputy Health Minister all have the virus.

But don’t worry, the crazed ayatollahs have everything under control. An Iranian government spokesman has dismissed the West’s policy of trying to contain the virus by isolating those suspected of being infected and has called the West’s approach “stone age”. The Iranian policy for containing the virus is to keep all the main religious shrines open -� particularly those in the holy city of Qom where the Iranian Covid-19� outbreak started – and to encourage huge numbers of people to visit these sites to pray as these religious sites apparently have “healing powers”.

Brilliant? What could possibly go wrong?

2. The main conspiracy theories

There appear to be three main conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 virus

Theory 1 – It originated at a Chinese government laboratory in Wuhan

I have already written a couple of blogs about the Wuhan Institute of Virology being China’s first WHO-rated Level 4 facility because, like the UK’s Porton Down, it handles diseases and viruses for which there is no known cure. I have also quoted part of Dr Peng Zhou’s description of his work from the Institute’s website���Taking bats as the research object, I will answer�the molecular mechanism that can coexist�with Ebola and�SARS-�associated coronavirus for a�long time�without causing disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity.�Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals�

It would be a coincidence of brobdingnagian proportions if the outbreak which started just a few miles from Dr Zhou’s laboratory really wasn’t connected with an accidental leak from the laboratory.

Theory 2 – The virus was bio-engineered and didn’t occur naturally

While mainstream scientists continue to perform mental gymnastics to insist that the new coronavirus wasn’t man-made, new research from scientists in China and Europe reveal that the disease happens to have�an ‘HIV-like mutation’ which allows it to bind with human cells up to 1,000 times stronger than the Sars virus, according to�SCMP.

Recall that at the end of January, a team of Indian scientists wrote in a�now-retracted�paper claiming that the coronavirus may have been genetically engineered to incorporate parts of the HIV genome, writing “This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is�unlikely to be fortuitous in nature,” meaning – it was unlikely to have occurred naturally.

Fast forward to new research by a team from Nankai University, which writes that�COV-19 has an ‘HIV-like mutation’ that� allows it to quickly enter the human body by binding with a receptor called ACE2 on a cell membrane.

Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be �cut� at specific points to activate their various functions.

When looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin�found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola. –SCMP

“This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV [the new coronavirus] may be significantly different from the Sars coronavirus in the infection pathway,” reads the paper published this month on Chinaxiv.org – a platform used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences which releases research papers prior to peer-review.

Theory 3 – The virus came from a biological weapons development programme

Who knows?