J : There’s been a rumor of a biological trade war between the United States and China. It has gained momentum after disputed social media talks on U.S. patents, articles published in Granma and mutual accusations of the Chinese Foreign Minister and CIA agents against each other. How do you see this circus ?
RW : Such utterly unfounded accusations are part and parcel of what I call pandemic theater. The efforts we just talked of to control populations within-country are rivaled only by attempts to pin blame for the present pandemic and its socioeconomic ramifications upon other countries. These are all modern updates on calling diseases after an international enemy, now spun into vast, unsubstantiated conspiratorial theories aimed at fast-talking debunkers into exhaustion. What were previously simplified into piquant aliases, such as the Spanish flu or the French disease, are now wound into stories about Wuhan labs or biowarfare gone amok.
Much as for UFOlogy—space saucers, aliens, and the like—perpetrators of such frauds and their dupes are seeking a means by which to avoid grasping the material roots by which capital-led modes of production are increasing our vulnerabilities to the emergence of multiple pathogens of pandemic or near-pandemic capacity. We’ve seen in rapid succession, upon deforestation and development, H5N1, SARS‑1, H1N1 (2009), MERS, H7N9, Ebola Makona, Zika, African swine fever, and now SARS‑2 exit out of marginalized wild reservoirs across poultry and livestock and into human populations. Blaming an enemy allows rulers to avoid having to blame themselves for the sudden surge in multiple deadly diseases.