The Covid-19 pandemic has officially caused the deaths of almost seven million people so far, but this is likely a gross underestimate. Some studies have estimated from excess deaths data that the true death toll is around 21 million people. Other studies have consistently shown that even a non-hospitalised, ‘mild’ Covid-19 infection is associated with increased risks of heart attacks, blood clots and strokes. The rate is reduced by vaccination, but not to zero. Life expectancy has fallen in every continent. Covid-19 killed 267,000 people in the US, and 39,000 in the UK in 2022, the very year the imperialists insist that the pandemic ended.
Whilst the response to the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 was hampered by the capitalist system, understanding the origins of the coronavirus pandemic is crucial to preventing future outbreaks developing into the next catastrophic pandemic. The imperialist ruling classes continue to use the pandemic as a political tool for attacking China. In the latest attempt on 26 February 2023, the New York Times reported that the US Energy Department had ‘concluded that the pandemic was likely caused by a lab leak’. The FBI agreed, and that China was ‘thwarting and obfuscating efforts’ to find the source. The ‘lab leak’ (sometimes deliberate, sometimes by accident) propaganda theory has no basis in fact. The same people who claimed the virus is a harmless, mild cold, also claim the virus was released deliberately following dangerous, shadowy research. All the crackpots need to get together and at least agree on one ‘theory’.
Pandemic origins
It is known that live mammals susceptible to coronaviruses (CoVs), were sold at four live-animal markets including Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan before the pandemic. SARS-CoV-1 viruses were found in raccoon dogs during the SARS outbreak in 2003, facilitated by animal-to-human contact (zoonotic spillover) in live-animal markets in China. Wuhan hospital’s earliest Covid-19 cases were linked to Huanan Market, and 33% of 168 cases within Wuhan retrospectively identified by the WHO-China report in February 2020, were also linked to the market.
In addition, many of the over 100 Covid-19 cases from December 2019 with no epidemiologic link to Huanan Market lived in its direct vicinity and that again provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market (Michael Worobey, Science November 2021). Further studies published in February 2022, show that there were at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans in November–December 2019 and that, just as with SARS and MERS, there were likely multiple zoonotic spillover events that led to the emergence of Covid-19.Whilst uncertainty surrounds the actual circumstances of which intermediate animal host was the proximal ancestor for the virus and how and when the first host jump occurred, the geographical proximity of positive environmental samples and the earliest Covid-19 cases to live animal vendors point to Huanan market as the origin of the pandemic.
As Peter Daszak, president of Ecohealth Alliance, has reported, there are hotspots for bat-to-human spillover of SARs type CoVs
‘…in a large geographic area in southern China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and further potential for viral emergence across the whole region…[and] estimates the number of people infected annually with novel bat-SARSr-CoVs as a median of 50,000 and a mean of 400,000. This highlights a substantial public health risk, further consolidates our underlying assumption that viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are far more likely to have emerged via a so-called “natural” pathway than a so-called “lab-leak”’.
The US government withdrew funding for EcoHealth Alliance and its work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in April 2020, thwarting and obfuscating exactly the kind of scientific collaboration necessary to study these viruses and to understand pandemic origins.
Matt Hancock and the ‘Lockdown Files’
Matt Hancock, the former Health Secretary sacked after being caught breaking his own rules on household contacts, has cashed in on the pandemic through a ghost-written, self-congratulatory book Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle Against Covid. The book is an attempt to rewrite history after an overview by Imperial College of Covid-19 transmission in England during the first two waves between March and December 2020 showed that delayed action by the British government led to 21,000 unnecessary deaths (Edward S Knock et al. Science Translational Medicine, 14 July 2021).
The journalist who received Hancock’s 100,000 WhatsApp messages, Isabel Oakeshott, subsequently leaked them to the right-wing Daily Telegraph which has selectively published them as the ‘Lockdown files’. Brexiteer Oakeshott has claimed face masks are merely ‘political’ and ‘nothing to do with genuine infection control’ and that the lockdowns were ‘unnecessary’. The Imperial College study shows that ‘only national lockdown brought the reproduction number below 1 consistently in the first wave’.
The WhatsApp messages have revealed that:
- Hancock rejected guidance in April 2020 from England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty that all people going into care homes should be tested for Covid-19. This guidance was not introduced until 14 August 2020. The infection fatality rate for all elderly in care homes was 36% but 10% in the community for over 80s and 1.3% nationally in the first wave. As a result, 40,000 people died in care homes in England in the first two waves.
- Hancock referred to Rishi Sunak’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme in August 2020 as the ‘eat out to help get the virus about’ but admitted to keeping it out of the news even though he knew it was driving up cases and causing serious problems. Eat Out to Help Out offered diners 50% off food and non-alcoholic drinks on Mondays to Wednesdays, capped at £10 per head. Business secretary Alok Sharma and Sunak both objected to restaurants being made to register diners for contact tracing. A study by Warwick University in October 2020 showed that despite government denials, the scheme had caused new clusters of infection in areas where it was operational.
Hancock’s account has no merit whatsoever, and merely provides material for public health sceptics to rubbish every attempt to control the spread of the virus.
Charles Chinweizu
