Iranian antisemitic virus scare story infects conspiracy websites
The SARS corona virus transmitted by place not by race
In this post: the original story from Press TV, probably taken from 2, a BBC story about a new virus. Our postings editor, and Jim White of ’empty wheel’ cast a sceptical eye.
Press TV Fars News agency, occupycorporatism.com, sott.net, socioecohistory.wordpress,12160.info/, resisting the new world order, sgtreport.com/., The Mahoney tocmahoney, Occupy Palestine, www.godlikeproductions.com/foraworldchaos.wordpress.com,were some of the recirculators of this story of a Zionist/UK-made bio-weapon targeted on people from the Middle East.
UK, Israel seeking to develop SARS-like race-specific bio-weapon
Press TV (Iran)
October 9, 2012
British and Zionist health experts are working on a SARS-like race-specific bio-weapon, which could be capable of creating a global threat through triggering a massive ethnic cleansing, it has been claimed.
The claim was made following the identification by the World Health Organization (WHO) of a new SARS-like race-specific virus that targets people of Middle Eastern decent. The original SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) resulted in the death of numerous people in Hong Kong.
The Zionist-led Israeli regime has been seeking to spot specific genes carried by human of Arab decent in an attempt to develop a race-specific bio-weapon that could covertly be exposed to Arab populations in order to commit a massive ethnic cleansing whenever necessary.
Anonymous intelligence sources have also claimed that work is underway to create genetically modified bacterium/virus as a bio-weapon which could be deployed through the air or water supply.
According to intelligence sources Israeli Defense, working with a British defense apparatus at Porton Down, is seeking to produce this race-specific bio-weapon.
Earlier in September, the first case of SARS-like virus was indentified in Qatar. The victim was transferred to Britain, where it was discovered that the coronavirus was similar to SARS as far as its structure is concerned. The second case was a Saudi-born woman who died after being attacked by the new virus.
The symptoms of the new SARS-like virus have been said to be fever, cough and other respiratory signals.
SARS suddenly surfaced between November 2002 and July 2003. An estimated 8,098 people of Asian descent were infected and 774 of them succumbed to the race-specific virus.
New ‘Sars-like’ coronavirus identified by UK officials
By Michelle Roberts, Health editor, BBC News online
24 September 2012
In both cases to date, the infection was acquired in the Middle East
A new respiratory illness similar to the Sars virus that spread globally in 2003 and killed hundreds of people has been identified in a man who is being treated in Britain.
The 49-year-old man, who was transferred to a London hospital by air ambulance from Qatar, is the second person confirmed with the coronavirus.
The first case was a patient in Saudi Arabia who has since died.
Officials are still determining what threat the new virus may pose.
The World Health Organization has not recommended any travel restrictions.
Prof John Watson, head of the respiratory diseases department at the UK’s Health Protection Agency, said: “In the light of the severity of the illness that has been identified in the two confirmed cases, immediate steps have been taken to ensure that people who have been in contact with the UK case have not been infected, and there is no evidence to suggest that they have.
“Further information about these cases is being developed for healthcare workers in the UK, as well as advice to help maintain increased vigilance for this virus.”
He said there was no specific evidence of the virus spreading from person to person and he had no advice for the public or returning travellers.
Peter Openshaw, director of the Centre for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College London, told Reuters that at this stage the novel virus looked unlikely to prove a concern, and may well only have been identified due to sophisticated testing techniques.
And Prof John Oxford, a virology expert at Queen Mary, University of London, said he felt “somewhat relaxed” about the news.
“Sars was very quick off the mark infecting hospital staff etc and this new virus does not to me appear to be in the same ‘big bang’ group.”
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses which includes ones that cause the common cold and Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome).
This new virus is different from any coronaviruses that have previously been identified in humans.
There have been a small number of other cases of serious respiratory illness in the Middle East in the past three months, one of whom was treated in the UK but has since died.
This person’s illness is also being investigated, although there is no evidence as yet to suggest that it is caused by the same virus or linked to the current case. No other confirmed cases have been identified to date in the UK.
Sars is a serious respiratory infection that caused a global outbreak in 2002, spreading from Hong Kong to more than 30 different countries around the world and killing around 800 people. Although it has not been eradicated its spread was fully contained in 2003. Like other coronaviruses, it is spread through droplets of body fluids – produced by sneezing and coughing.
Is this story feasible?
By JfJfP postings editor
October 10, 2012
It has all the hall-marks of an antisemitic hoax, although as both Jews and Arabs are Semitic people, a weapon which killed one but left the other unharmed stretches the bounds of probability. It would be particularly problematic if these bio-weapons were let loose in Palestine:
In a study of Israeli and Palestinian Muslim Arabs, more than 70% of Jewish men and 82% of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years. “Our recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool”[12] ^ Nebel A, Filon D, Weiss DA, et al. (December 2000). “High-resolution Y chromosome haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs reveal geographic substructure and substantial overlap with haplotypes of Jews”. Human Genetics 107 (6): 630–641.
Perhaps this is why some versions of the story refer instead to people of Mid-East origin (which would also make Iranians, who are not Arab, primary potential victims). Yet given the spread of Arabs westwards across Africa and Europe and eastward and north across Asia , with consequent inter-marriage, over many generations, there are few Arabs who share an absolutely distinct and separate genetic make-up.
The story also claims that SARS was a race-specific virus, affecting only ‘Asians’. Assuming they don’t mean people from the Asia that stretches from Siberia to Israel, but just from Pakistan to Japan, the many peoples who live there do not constitute a race. And two of the centres of the illness were Toronto and Singapore, both very multi-ethnic.
For more expert opinion, JfJfP asked David Leon, Professor of Epidemiology at the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine for a comment. He said:
I am highly sceptical about this. There have been stories before that ‘enemies’ can take blood and tissue samples from the people in one country in order to develop bio-weapons that would target only those people. This is complete science fiction given the current state of knowledge.
In terms of this story about making a virus that would target ‘people from the Middle East’:
1) the fact that there are ancestry-specific genetic markers (ie that the genomes of people reflect in part where their forbears came from) is well established. However,there are relatively few examples of these differences being strong predictors of disease or susceptibility to infectious or other diseases. Exceptions might be sickle cell and malaria (having sickle cell genes protects against malaria) and being of South Asian ancestry and risk of type 2 diabetes. There are rare special cases of rare genetic disorders that are more common in for example Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs disease.
2) the notion that one is going to be able to develop a pathogen that targets a particular “race” is profoundly flawed because of the vacuous concept of genetic “race”. People in the Middle East are mixtures of all sorts of ancestries as are
people in the UK. There is no “pure” line where everyone who is of “Middle East origin” will have a specific set of gene variants and everyone who is not from the Middle East will lack.3) the fact that the virus comes from a particular region, and may be novel, just says the virus outbreak originated there.
As with all these sorts of stories there will be snippets of something defensible -but I think it highly implausible that anyone is spending money developing such a “weapon”. It is bizarre and takes more from the “race bound” politics of the Middle East that science per se.
Not The Onion? PressTV Claims British, Israeli Scientists Developing SARS Virus Targeting Arabs
By Jim White, empty wheel
October 09, 2012
After Iran’s Fars News Agency was fooled last month by an article in The Onion, you might think Iran’s press would be a bit more careful in what it chooses to publish, but PressTV today seems to have topped ”rural white American voters prefer Ahmadinejad over Obama” by choosing to publish accusations that British and Israeli scientists are hard at work developing a version of the SARS virus that attacks only Arabs.
The article opens with its wild charge:
British and Zionist health experts are working on a SARS-like race-specific bio-weapon, which could be capable of creating a global threat through triggering a massive ethnic cleansing, it has been claimed.
The claim was made following the identification by the World Health Organization (WHO) of a new SARS-like race-specific virus that targets people of Middle Eastern decent. [sic] The original SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) resulted in the death of numerous people in Hong Kong
PressTV is assigning remarkable power to these scientists, because the accusation is based on a new virus that has been seen only in a grand total of two cases, with the first being in June. The claim that the virus is “race-specific” appears to come from the WHO description of the virus, but in fact PressTV and the accusers miss a key part of the description:
travel to or residence in an area where infection with novel coronavirus has recently been reported or where transmission could have occurred;*
The asterisk is linked to:
* Currently, these areas would include only Qatar and Saudi Arabia (as of 29 September 2012).
The two known cases involve residents of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but the accusation that this virus has been magically engineered to be race-specific completely overlooks that WHO would consider this virus to be involved for any person of any race who recently traveled to Saudi Arabia or Qatar and displayed the other diagnostic criteria they describe.
It appears that PressTV is crediting “intelligence sources” for the accusations. The article continues:
The Zionist-led Israeli regime has been seeking to spot specific genes carried by human of Arab decent in an attempt to develop a race-specific bio-weapon that could covertly be exposed to Arab populations in order to commit a massive ethnic cleansing whenever necessary.
Anonymous intelligence sources have also claimed that work is underway to create genetically modified bacterium/virus as a bio-weapon which could be deployed through the air or water supply.
According to intelligence sources Israeli Defense, working with a British defense apparatus at Porton Down, is seeking to produce this race-specific bio-weapon.
The latest news from WHO puts even more of a damper on claims that this virus is a new super biological weapon:
WHO has continued to monitor the situation. No additional confirmed cases have been reported and there is no evidence so far of person to person transmission of the novel coronavirus.
In order for the virus to achieve “massive ethnic cleansing” it would be necessary for it to spread from person to person quickly and efficiently before killing those infected. Instead, the two known cases of the virus have been isolated, with no known persons with whom the infected people came into contact developing symptoms of the disease.
Should US scientists consider it an insult that they were not included in the conspiracy theory?