In normal times, it is estimated that 1/5 people will be dealing with mental health issues, these are not normal times though, and as we all come to terms with the deadly potential of the Coronavirus, the isolation, the fear, the financial stresses and of course the unknowns that are too many to count right now, add those and that estimate is going to get worse. That’s before you add the agendas here, as many people with too many personal, racial, profitable and social agendas will happily throw fuel on any fire to highlight them. All of which will be retailing on social media now and some are fuelled by the very politicians you would expect to protect people when a pandemic like this hits. There is a lot to criticise about the handling of the pandemic too but a lot of the angry ones online will be jockeying for our attentions, by tossing some rather insane ideas out there, throw in a few long science buzz words and achieve a temporary credibility that pushes your point across. There are repeated claims that this virus was cooked up in weapons labs, this has evolved into the World Health Organisation (WHO) Wuhan office engineering the coronavirus and testing it. This flies against the fact that the animal variants are almost indistinguishable from the human variant to the point that they are the same naturally occurring virus. Plus creating bio weapons is not the WHO’s mission brief. It’s rubbish that is circulating and distracting from the solutions that we are having to embrace. Donald Trump’s use of the term Chinese Virus in his statements is equally inaccurate, as almost every food chain in the world involves a level of dodgy practice to it too. Let’s face it, as more people tumble into problems the more they will look for someone to blame, but the blame game can only be played out at the end of this pandemic tunnel, when all the political fun houses can start again. Since it has become pretty clear that a lot of us are floundering and that the opening statistic could hit 3/5 or even 5/5, I figured it may be time to look at other epidemics so you may have a better understanding of how viruses work.

Thinking about mythical bio weapons and blame, then you don’t have to go much further than HIV/aids. When first discovered it was called the gay plague, the pink peril and an Arse Injected Death Sentence. All that was said by the same mindsets we are dealing with now, putting aside the bigoted assumption that gay men weren’t mammals like the rest of us, and yes the Daily Mail was running with the End of days articles about it, but it took years to figure out what the hell this virus was. Then one of the strains was found to have a preference for infecting people of African descent and that was when the whole Bio Weapon theory started. Yet what is it, where is it from? That took over a decade and a lot of technological evolutions to figure out. So here in the simplest language I can come up with is a potted history of the HIV virus. Believe it or not, Queen Victoria could still have been ruling the British Empire back when it started. It started in the jungles in and around Cameroon, it started with three primates as well. One Sooty Mangabey monkey, one chimpanzee and one human being. Now predating HIV is SIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Simeon Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV)). Both cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome in the species they infect which slowly decimates the host’s immune system and then every other illness, virus and bacteria can and will run amuck within them. Monkeys, chimps and humans are all primates. So how did this happen? How did a Lentivirus member of the Retroviridae family of viruses jump species?

I have to use a long word here which is zoonosis. SIV is specific to various primate species. Now, when a virus jumps species it is called zoonosis, which is also called spillover. Somewhere between 1880-1905 a figure called the Cut Hunter comes into the frame. I will demystify the name here, it is simply a bush hunter with an open cut probably on his hand, but Mr Cut caught a Sooty Mangabey monkey, a monkey that was infected with SIV and then his and the monkey’s blood mixed with each other, probably as he skinned his catch. Potential spillover point one. Then possibly on the same day, he caught a chimpanzee that was infected with the chimpanzee SIV variation, potential spillover point two. Now the point of zoonosis would have occurred in their blood stream, when the two SIV strains met, and came across something called a plasmid. Plasmids have broken membranes and contain quite random accumulations of your genetic material, their function is still open to debate but it looks like an organic genetic tool kit of spare bits for cellular use. It’s a bit like the accumulated nuts, bolts, screws and bits that any household tool box would have. Once the SIV viruses started playing Tetris with these bits, HIV was born. Even though it is a different viral family, this mirrors the situation with animal markets that has caused what is happening today. In fact, it is natural.

So how come nobody identified the disease before the late eighties? Much was still unknown about the way infections worked back then. If I tell you that immunisation campaigns up until the forties and fifties involved sharing needles, because sterilisation techniques were not fully understood or implemented, you can then see how this evolved over a long time. Plus initially HIV could have been symptomless causing little harm. It’s a particularly insidious virus, it’s an expert at camouflage that has evolved in Africa and lives alongside a hoard of other tropical viruses and illnesses. The saddest truths are that HIV wasn’t what was killing people, it uniquely disables the immune system and then lets other conditions like malaria or cancer kill the host. Yet, for potentially a hundred years it remained unnoticed, lost in a huge pile of technically accurate death certificates. Slowly growing and then exploiting the growth of mobility that Africa, like the rest of the world experienced over the 20th century, to become a spectre in our bedrooms today worldwide. Listen, sometime in the 1940’s, in Africa, I cannot remember where or the year, a doctor sealed a blood sample, something suspect about something made him do that, we don’t know who the patient was, we don’t know the medical history, we don’t even know the name of the doctor who did this, but what we do know is that something didn’t add up to that doctor, and when the sample was tested by modern technology, we learnt one more thing, the patient was HIV positive. Viruses do not need a lab to evolve into deadly variants, viruses don’t care about ethics, viruses simply exploit opportunities when and wherever they can. Viruses have been with us since our earliest history, you may not be feeling very receptive to my next point, but life on earth started with animated minerals very much like viruses and bacteria. HIV has had every insane theory thrown at it, and because it is primarily a sexually transmitted infection, it has had every shaming blame about lifestyles and human social differences obsessed upon, often by those who would readily throw the first rock if it suited their moral position. The truth of it though is simple. Over a hundred years ago someone caught the wrong pair of monkeys, and then we had to wait for the virus to travel to a richer better equipped country, a country that wasn’t beset with tropical illnesses, for it to be noticed, until today where nobody over the age of ten does not know what a condom is, and where we still have not got an effective vaccine.

The blame game is a human social psychological defence mechanism. It’s true that the current crisis started in a Wuhan wet food market, but every country in the world has dodgy farming practices, every country. Looking at Britain we currently have a problem with bovine TB, okay lets have a look at that for a moment. Firstly, it isn’t a virus, it’s a bacterial infection. However, infections are infections, and although very different to the Coronavirus, it is still an infection pathway worth looking at. This one involves almost an entire animal food chain. In the 1930s it was estimated that 40% of Britain’s cattle were infected with Bovine TB (M.bovis.). 50,000 people were infected every year back then, but the government agencies at that time considered the risk of people contacting M.bovis from cattle as low. Who knows, maybe they had a different scale of reference back then, maybe the value of a life was low too, but the problem is still with us today, although the human infections have gone down-2 in 2014, house cat to human infections. I am pretty certain that somewhere back in the 30’s a paranoid farmer would have been in the village pub, blaming an unknown evil for deliberately infecting his herds and presumably him and his farm workers. So flashing forwards to today, where we know that even house cats and fallow deer can be infectious carriers of M.bovis, and Britain still has a major cow problem. Consumers are in no danger either, thanks to the pasteurisation process for milk production which has reduced the risks to zero. It doesn’t flash from cow to human either. In fact, it is not a significant or noticeable public health threat.

What M.bovis does do is cost farming a lot of money annually. Now, there were a few options on the table to deal with this problem, one is by improving farms working methodology, two is to force the entire country to go vegetarian/vegan, or three, blame badgers. Farmers are quite conservative creatures of habit, and a whole new bunch of farming rules would involve extra work, new ideas, and of course more enforcement. Even with Brexit rolling along in full force you couldn’t blame Europe for this problem, and in the badger was a perfect scapegoat. Badgers have a high rate of M.bovis infections. Even though previous and expansive test culls of badgers had been found to have absolutely little or no impact on M.bovis cattle infections, even though the last human infections were from house cats, even though cows would still die, the badgers were blamed for the entire thing. It had nothing to do with bad farming practices, it was badgers. Please the next time you read someone blaming China for the coronavirus reply and call them badger blamers. Over the last year a massive and completely unnecessary badger cull has been happening. It has achieved pretty much nothing, because the M.bovis bacterium occurs naturally in Mother Nature. The cows are still dying, getting sick and being put down. This is what happens when scapegoating is let loose. It’s almost an abject lesson in how pointless it is to scapegoat, because it has achieved nothing, cost a lot of money, and reduced badger numbers unnecessarily. The worst part is, I like badgers.

My overall point here is that neither of these two very different epidemics were man made, the chaos around both of them was, but nobody was in a Doctor Evil lab cooking them up. The original Sars-Cov1 outbreak in 2002/4 was nobodies fault. At the time I write this there are hundreds of other Coronaviruses out and about, all of which are only known to infect none human species, any one of them could jump species at any time by good old fashioned random dumb bad luck. If we look to animals being displaced from their habitats as just one of the zillions of possible reasons for this, humans will be exposed again and again to novel viruses. It’s never been a matter of if this will happen, but always a when will it happen. I can tell you what is happening in labs all over the world right now. People are using science, to study and understand the current pandemic, to understand the infection method, to understand the various health impacts and all that studying results in solutions. Ultimately, all the science could result in a vaccine. That is all that is going on in those labs. This is not a political problem, this is a major public health nightmare. The blame game doesn’t help resolve any of the issues we are facing, it achieves nothing, resolves nothing and ultimately hinders solutions when powerful fools play with it. Your health is important, too important to waste time reading agenda led misleading crap.

This article started with a figure of 1/5. Remember that when you see something online that makes little or no sense. Remember too that no outbreak or pandemic or exploding volcano makes a lot of sense at the time it is happening. Two or three years from now thousands of books will be written, movies and maybe even comics about all that is happening, after a lot of dissection lessons will have been learned and good and bad decisions will be illuminated, but as you may have realised already, the Coronavirus pandemic is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s a natural process and we have to figure it out before things will get better. We are all facing an unfamiliar level of isolation, stress and fear, but do not replace the unknown future with an even worse nightmare, do not allow anyone to play on your fears or emotions, or use them for their own advantage. Trust me, it’s gonna be a crazy scary rocket ride in your living room, without other people throwing over moralised, insane or racial rocks through your window. Use the two outbreaks as an example, we have a lot to learn here, a lot of catching up to do, and we have to stop making mistakes, en masse. We have to trust science to do science, as anything else is simply a mistake. Fear can work like a germ, or like a virus, it can spread. Don’t let it.