Bio-warriors and bio-rumours

Is the world about to end? The coronavirus pandemic has led to the banding together of strident bio-warriors, many of whom are of the ultra-rightist religious persuasion and are bent on linking every medical challenge with apocalyptic predictions. Their greatest weapon consists of biorumours creatively presented to imitate scientific facts. They argue that everything has been ordained by God from the very beginning.

I hope I run no risk of being misunderstood when I say that God cannot be against science because he is the Author of all. Where a scientist gives me an empirically verifiable explanation for a phenomenon and a pastor or Imam gives me an esoteric worldview on the same subject, I will embrace the scientist’s answer. God did not give us brains in order to reject the scientific results of extensive intellectual exertions.

Last week, I ran across one of the active rumours linking coronavirus to the imminent introduction of 5G technology by my computer guru friend, Chikezie Nwosu, and he immediately said, “It’s absolutely and unequivocally rubbish”. That was the push I needed to continue my research into the subject before the tail of ignorance starts wagging the dog of our collective consciousness.

COVID-19 has exposed the fact that ignorance is alive and well in Europe and America. 5G is the fifth generation of wireless network technology. It is an improvement over 4G just as 4G was superior to 3G and 2G. 5G mobile data is transmitted over radio waves - a small part of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. These radio waves don’t damage the DNA inside cells. In a simple language, 5G implies transmission of greater quantum of energy per time, so heavy data such as movies will download faster and will be transmitted at higher resolution. Indeed, as Prof. Farai argues on social media, “How can mankind, who has been bathing under the shower of UV radiation from the sun over the ages, now be under any threat of a radiation of energy over 1 million times less energy than UV radiation?”

There has also been a sustained campaign to somehow rope billionaire Bill Gates into the conspiracy theory. It is alleged that Bill Gates created the new coronavirus to control the world, and he is creating a vaccine for it. According to PHE, “This is incorrect. The claim may refer to a patent application for a different coronavirus filed by the Pirbright Institute, which receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, although not for this patented work. It is crazy how people sew unrelated pieces of information together and serve them as discoveries!

Conspiracy theories on bio-terrorism are not new. Louis Farrakhan’s theories about the plan of White America to depopulate Black communities with the use of bio-weapons are well known. In an article titled ‘Final Call’, Farrakhan alleges that one of the methods the US government will use to depopulate Black communities is infection through bio-weapons such as Ebola and AIDS which are race-targeting weapons. “There is a weapon that can be put in a room where there are Black and White people, and it will kill only the Black and spare the White, because it is a genotype weapon that is designed for your genes, for your race, for your kind….”

I can neither vouch for the US government nor for Mr. Farrakhan in this matter. Only scientists can tread in those oven-hot paths.

There has also been a sustained attack on China with various tales of how that country created the virus in order to control the world. One of the best responses to that fib was made by Prof. Femi Mimiko: “Any careful observation of the major trends in the global system in the past few decades, especially since WW II, would have revealed the reality of a hegemon in decline, and the systematic rise of a new one. We may not be fond of the closed nature of the Chinese system, or their attitude to workers in the workplace, but we are talking of a country that is so methodical, and has sustained a monolithic political structure for thousands of years; and determinedly pushed Britain out of Hong Kong, its last colonial honey pot. It is a global power that has refrained from going into any major war, while its competitors, the Soviet Union, got bogged down for a decade in Afghanistan, and disintegrated; and the US almost bled to death in Vietnam, and the Middle East.”

Forget conspiracy theories. The world is not about to end. And at the end of this scourge, COVID-19 will not even go down as one of the worst 10 pandemics ever. If in doubt, check out the ANTONINE PLAGUE of 165AD which claimed 5 million lives; the PLAGUE OF JUSTINIAN which occurred between 541 to 542, killing 25 million people in one year; THE FLU PANDEMIC, a.k.a. THE SPANISH FLU of 1918 to 1920 which afflicted 500million, i.e., 1/3 of the total world population, killing a record 25 million people in the first week alone — worse than World War I.

There were many others, among which were THE 3RD PLAGUE OF 1855 which started from China and killed 10 million Indians in less than one year; THE BLACK DEATH which occurred from 1346-1353, which killed 200 million out of a world population of 400million; and only recently, HIVAIDS which recorded 36 million deaths between 2005 and 2012.

Don’t let anyone frighten you. COVID-19 may be terrible, but it could have been worse. More dreadful diseases ran their funereal courses and were eventually consigned to history. This, too, shall pass.