With all the concern being expressed regarding the current COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak, we have encountered the usual amount of rumors, unsubstantiated claims, conspiracy theories, misinterpretations and outright lies from public elected officials, from the general public, on social media and on the Internet. This has inspired us to release another edition of the Forked Tongue Files. Here, we will examine several of these claims and consider the validity (or lack thereof) of each.
1. Is a Full “Lockdown” or the Building of “Herd Immunity” the Best Way to Combat the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Most countries around the world have now resorted to a variation of a “full lockdown” of civil society to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection from person to person, especially after the number of infections, hospital admissions and deaths began to skyrocket.
While the outbreak first gained worldwide attention after an alleged origin in so-called “wet markets” of exotic animals and produce in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, and it subsequently seemed to rage out-of-control in countries like China, Italy, and now the United States, the responses of several countries to the pandemic attracted attention for a variety of reasons. Of particular interest to us in this post are the responses of Singapore, who seemed to respond quickly to the virus; South Korea, where an initial outbreak was tamped down with a series of aggressive measures which may or may not be workable in the United States, and Sweden, whose more “laissez-faire” approach first garnered interest and some praise but may now be questioned as a recent surge in infections and deaths has occurred.
Singapore
The Organization for World Peace included an April 6 article by Naomi K. L. Wang, Can Singapore’s Response To Covid-19 Still Be An Example For The World? (https://theowp.org/can-singapores-response-to-covid-19-still-be-an-example-for-the-world/), which briefly describes the response of Singapore, using quarantines, extensive testing and tracing of people’s contacts, to keep the spread of the pandemic to a minimum. Coronavirus cases in Singapore were controlled for some time as a result, leading to expressions of praise from many world leaders. But as the disease has progressed worldwide and the resultant number of cases has increased even in Singapore, their strategy, though not in any way discredited, has been put to the test. Perhaps the strategy of Singapore will ultimately pass that test.
South Korea
The Daily Signal posted a report by Fred Lucas on March 27, 5 Things Americans Should Know About South Korea’s Handling of Coronavirus (https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/03/27/5-things-americans-should-know-about-south-koreas-handling-of-coronavirus/), which gave a brief description of that country’s handling of the outbreak, including increased surveillance and testing which may be difficult to implement in the United States due to civil-liberties concerns.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies published a March 27 report by Victor Cha and Dana Kim, A Timeline of South Korea’s Response to COVID-19 (https://www.csis.org/analysis/timeline-south-koreas-response-covid-19). Here is the introduction to that report, which can be read in full at the link above:
South Korea saw its first confirmed COVID-19 case on January 20. The rate of infection gradually moved to 30 by February 17. Then on February 18, media reports surfaced that a 61-year-old Korean woman tested positive for the virus in Daegu, South Korea’s third-largest city. Dubbed “Patient 31,” this particular case not only represented a critical point that led to the rapid transmission of the virus through the rest of Korean society. It also came to serve as a warning to the rest of the world by underscoring the grave consequences of failing to practice social distancing and self-isolation.
South Korea saw a steep spike of case numbers in the following weeks and reached its peak daily case count on February 29 – forty days after its first confirmed case on January 20 – with 909 new cases and up nearly 500 from the previous day. It became the second most infected country after China by early March. South Korea undertook a massive public and private sector effort to fashion a national response to the pandemic. Korea’s drive-through testing gained media attention around the world and was hailed as an ingenious measure to protect healthcare workers from exposure while providing expeditious results to prospective patients.
Now, two months after the first confirmed case, South Korea is commended for its efforts to contain the outbreak. Though the response was not without its flaws, the Korea case is distinct in several respects.
Early: An early and almost immediate response after the first case on January 20.
Speed: A premium on moving as quickly as possible in setting up a testing regime.
Transparency: Real-time and frequent information dissemination to the public.
Public-Private sector: Enlisting companies with needed resources in a private-public sector response.
National organization: Organized as a national effort rather than at the city, provincial, or local levels.
Through timely development and approval of a functioning diagnostic test, frequent dissemination of information and public resources, heightened border control, and meticulous contact mapping through patient questionnaires and GPS-based mobile applications, South Korea’s efforts to “flatten the curve” are seemingly working. While the United States outranked China on March 26, 2020 as the country with the highest number of infected patients with an upwards of 84,000 confirmed cases, Korea now sits tenth on the roster of nations with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases.
To document this trajectory of South Korea’s national response efforts against the spread of COVID-19, the CSIS Korea Chair created a timeline of events outlining policies and other measures implemented to date.
Sweden
An article on the Web site of the National Review, Has Sweden Found the Right Solution to the Coronavirus? by John Fund & Joel Hay, April 6, 2020 (https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-sweden-avoids-isolation-economic-ruin/) described Sweden’s initial strategy of a relaxed COVID-19 response, only requiring elders and people with underlying medical conditions to self-isolate, as “courageous” and implied that world leaders, including US president Donald Trump, who have criticized this approach, are shortsighted.
Unlike other countries, it has so far avoided both isolation and economic ruin.
If the COVID-19 pandemic tails off in a few weeks, months before the alarmists claim it will, they will probably pivot immediately and pat themselves on the back for the brilliant social-distancing controls that they imposed on the world. They will claim that their heroic recommendations averted total calamity. Unfortunately, they will be wrong; and Sweden, which has done almost no mandated social distancing, will probably prove them wrong. …
The problem with lockdowns is that “you tire the system out,” Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, told the Guardian. “You can’t keep a lockdown going for months — it’s impossible.” He told Britain’s Daily Mail: “We can’t kill all our services. And unemployed people are a great threat to public health. It’s a factor you need to think about.”
If social isolation worked, wouldn’t Sweden, a Nordic country of 10.1 million people, be seeing the number of COVID-19 cases skyrocket into the tens of thousands, blowing past the numbers in Italy or New York City? As of today, there are 401 reported COVID-19 deaths in Sweden.
But an April 9, 2020 follow-up article from Time Magazine’s Mélissa Godin, Sweden’s Relaxed Approach to the Coronavirus Could Already Be Backfiring (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/swedens-relaxed-approach-to-the-coronavirus-could-already-be-backfiring/ar-BB12ohla?ocid=spartanntp), cast doubt on the efficacy of Sweden’s relatively relaxed approach:
Sweden has a relatively high case fatality rate: 7.68% of the Swedes who have tested positive for COVID-19 have then died of the virus. Neighboring countries, like Norway and Denmark, have case fatality rates of 1.46% and 3.85% respectively. (The U.S. case fatality rate is 3.21%.) While Sweden’s elevated case fatality rate could be a result of its low testing rates compared to its neighbors, experts say Sweden’s laissez-faire approach could also be to blame.
The Swedish government continues to advocate for relaxed measures. The Swedish Public Health Agency cautions citizens to cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze and wash hands regularly but does not call for lockdown measures. On March 11, the government cut down the size of permitted gatherings to 500, and only lowered that down to 50 on March 29. Other countries, like Germany and Australia, have prohibited gathering in groups larger than two. On Monday, Sweden declared that domestic flights would continue running, despite the risks domestic travel poses for spreading the disease.
2. Are 5G Cell Towers Connected to the CoronaVirus?
Several posts on Facebook have insisted that the real cause of the coronavirus pandemic is the proliferation of 5G (the 5th generation of wireless communication technology) cell phone towers. Despite the fact that these claims are made without providing any analysis of a causative link between 5G and coronavirus infection, authors of several of these posts not only insist that their theory is correct, but impugn the intelligence of any who question their conclusions. Even though epidemiologists have not publicly established a link between the electromagnetic energy of 5G and other wireless technology and the spread of infectious disease through bacteria or viruses, this tactic often has the desired effect of silencing critical analysis and debate about the issue and thus further fuels the rumor without needing to prove anything.
An April 9, 2020 article by James Temperton on the Web site of Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/the-rise-and-spread-of-a-5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory/), The Rise and Spread of a 5g Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory, details how a once-obscure theory from a doctor in Belgium gained adherents after his claims of a connection between 5G and coronavirus went, well, viral, and resulted in the burning of several 5G cell phone towers in the United Kingdom and, probably, elsewhere:
It started with one doctor. On January 22, Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws published an interview with Kris Van Kerckhoven, a general practitioner from Putte, near Antwerp. “5G is life-threatening, and no one knows it,” read the headline. One scientifically baseless claim in this article, published in a regional version of the paper’s print edition and since deleted from its website, sparked a conspiracy theory firestorm that has since torn through the internet and broken out into the real world, resulting in fires and threats. Van Kerckhoven didn’t just claim that 5G was dangerous: He also said it might be linked to coronavirus.
At the time, the outbreak was a comparative speck. It had claimed nine lives and infected 440 people, almost all of them in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Under the heading “Link met coronavirus?” the Het Laatste Nieuws journalist pointed out that since 2019 a number of 5G cell towers had been built around Wuhan. Could the two things be related? “I have not done a fact check,” Van Kerckhoven cautioned, before piling in. “But it may be a link with current events.” And so the fuse was lit.
Van Kerckhoven’s comments were quickly picked up by anti-5G campaigners in the Dutch-speaking world, with Facebook pages linking to and quoting from the article. Here, they claimed, was proof of something very dark indeed. Within days, the conspiracy theory had spread to dozens of English-language Facebook pages. But the conspiracy theory that Van Kerckhoven was peddling isn’t new. It has been bubbling away quietly for decades in unfounded concerns about high-voltage power lines in the 1980s to mobile phones in the 1990s. In coronavirus, such concerns had found a new hook.
We have read articles in the past that warned of possible side-effects of the then-new 4G communications technology. Those articles claimed that the signals emitted by 4G antennas may be disrupting the nervous systems if birds, butterflies and bees, which in turn could bring about a global collapse in the populations of the planet’s most important pollinators and lead to an environmental apocalypse. Other claims made the rounds about the possible neurological impacts on humans of 4G, and now 5G, signals. While these assertions have yet to be conclusively proven, they at least make some modicum of sense. That wireless signals would trigger the proliferation of a viral pathogen, however, have never been documented or proven, and don’t even make sense on a biological or epidemiological level. Until a causative relationship between 5G cell phone towers and COVID-19 infection can be substantiated, this claim only seems to be a distraction that can lead us to ignore the more obvious likely causes of the spread of a pandemic: physical contact or exchange of disease through breathing infected particles. Since the 5G claim seems to have been started by a Belgian doctor who incorrectly claimed Wuhan was the first location to use 5G towers (it was South Korea) and after only a handful of cases had even been reported (thus no statistically significant sample upon which to base any hypothesis), the spreading of this rumor with no evidence or documentation ranks with the “Black people are immune” assertion for lowering our collective vigilance and, in effect, helping lead our people to slaughter.
3. Do “Miracle Drugs” Work?
As the search for a treatment or a cure for coronavirus infection becomes more and more intense, attention is being focused on several drugs that have been promoted in one corner or another as possible cures. These medications have been touted often without thorough scientific studies or testing, and are sometimes based on hunches without any historical information or medical data to back up the claims. There are two prominent drugs that have received much of the attention.
Hydroxychloroquine
US president Donald Trump began to promote this drug during his press briefings in March, often mispronouncing the name as “Hydrochloroquine” or simply “Chloroquine”, a flub that resulted in tragedy when an Arizona couple swallowed tablets of chloroquine phosphate, used to disinfect fish tanks, thinking it was the same chemical. The husband fell gravely ill and died, while the wife was in critical condition in the hospital shortly thereafter, though she may thankfully be recovering. At one point she had reportedly admitted that she and her husband had heard Trump make reference to “chloroquine” and decided to try what they had on hand, perhaps reasoning, as Trump himself has said on several occasions, “what have we got to lose?”
For those who were listening more intently, hydroxychloroquine is a key ingredient in drugs that are taken to combat rheumatoid arthritis and related ailments. The drug is undergoing tests as you read this, but the side effects have not yet been studied to determine if the possible impact on heart rhythms, which can in rare cases be lethal, would constitute a sufficiently justifiable risk to make it a viable drug for COVID-19 patients.
Another complication comes from the occasional implications, proven or not, that Trump or members of his administration may be personally invested in drug companies that are attempting to establish hydroxychloroquine as the drug of choice for coronavirus patients. That, however, may be just another rumor.
Interferon Alpha 2B
This drug is profiled on the Web site Drugs.com (https://www.drugs.com/mtm/interferon-alfa-2b.html) and is described in slightly more descriptive terms on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferon_alfa-2b). A March 17, 2020 Counterpunch article by Helen Yaffe, Cuba’s Contribution to Combatting COVID-19 (https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/17/cubas-contribution-to-combatting-covid-19/), also discusses how interferons work, as well as how the drug was developed in Cuba and California, late-Carter-administration consultations between Dr. Clark Lee of the US, a team of Cuban doctors and a laboratory in Finland, and how the Cubans used the drug to halt an outbreak of dengue fever, which sparked the development of the Biological Front in 1981 and the establishment of the Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in 1986:
Since its first application to combat dengue fever, Cuba’s interferon has shown its efficacy and safety in the therapy of viral diseases including Hepatitis B and C, shingles, HIV-AIDS and dengue. Because it interferes with viral multiplication within cells, it has also been used in the treatment of different types of carcinomas. Time will tell if Interferon Alfa 2b proves to be the wonder drug as far as COVID-19 goes.
Telesur English published an article on March 17, Cuba’s Interferon Alpha 2B, Successful in Treating COVID-19 (https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Cubas-Interferon-Alpha-2B-Successful-in-Treating-COVID-19-20200317-0015.html):
In China, practically a few weeks after the beginning of the outbreak, people started to use Interferon in a way to avoid complications in people infected with the virus. According to Herrera, this molecule has “some side effects but not too critical.”
“The main idea of Interferon is just to avoid complications,” he told teleSUR. “Young people and people with a good immuno-response perhaps don’t need the medicine or people who won’t have complications and respond to the virus-like any other flu, but old people or people susceptible to have a bad immuno-response will have better chances of avoiding complications by using Interferon.”
He concluded that Cuba must participate in this solidarity movement with other nations, just “the same way other countries have had solidarity with Cuba, especially with Latin American and African countries.”
“We have more physicians working abroad than practically any other country in the world, not because we are exporting anything but simply because we want to participate in building a world with better health conditions and living conditions.”
Newsweek‘s Tom O’Connor wrote an article on March 24, 2020, Cuba Uses ‘Wonder Drug’ to Fight Coronavirus Around World Despite U.S. Sanctions (https://www.newsweek.com/cuba-drug-fight-coronavirus-us-sanctions-1493872):
The drug, called Interferon Alpha-2B Recombinant (IFNrec), is jointly developed by scientists from Cuba and China, where the coronavirus COVID-19 disease outbreak first emerged late last year. Already active in China since January, the Cuban Medical Brigades began deploying to dozens of nations, providing personnel and products such as its new anti-viral drug …
So far, while the Trump administration is concentrating on the development of hydroxychloroquine, it seems to be ignoring interferon alpha 2B, which appears to have more of a track record in treating a variety of diseases and is now being tried in China to treat coronavirus infections. This may be at least in part motivated by a desire to discredit anything developed and used by Cuba, as the US has resumed its efforts to isolate the island nation since the Trump administration took power in the US in 2017.
Still, this drug has not been subjected to the kinds of rigorous trials that would normally be held before officially declaring a drug safe to use. The apparent early successes of the drug in at least offering some treatment to coronavirus victims, however unverified they may be, and the dire circumstances of a global pandemic may justify moving forward before such trials are fully done, but it may still be premature to make a sweeping judgement of its efficacy before it is tested in controlled conditions by a worldwide cross-section of conscientious, thorough medical researchers and practitioners. It may indeed be a “wonder drug” that proves superior to remedies being researched and promoted by Western doctors, and it certainly deserves to be studied to ensure that is so. The apparent reluctance by US actors to even discuss it represents a prejudice against its Cuban promoters that may cost lives, but an honest study needs to be done.
4. Are Black People Immune to CoronaVirus?
In early to mid March, several videos and Facebook posts made the claim, in the absence of evidence, that “Black people were immune to the COVID-19 outbreak”. Not only did these reports either ignore or dismiss the reports of Afrikan Descendants from actor Idris Elba (including accusations that he was paid to report he had tested positive) to pro basketball players like Rudy Gobert and Kevin Durant having tested positive for coronavirus, not only did they ignore the recent death by coronavirus of Cameroonian Afrobeat/Afrojazz icon Manu Dibango, but they apparently also ignored the stories of everyday people of Afrikan descent who have become infected, suffered and even died from the disease.
A recent local tragic example was detailed in a story by Rachel DeSantis, 27-Year-Old Md. Grocery Store Worker Dies of Coronavirus: ‘Like a Hole in My Heart’ (https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/newsfeature/27-year-old-md-grocery-store-worker-dies-of-coronavirus-like-a-hole-in-my-heart/ar-BB12kwTJ?ocid=spartanntp) about 27-year-old Leilani Jordan , a grocery store clerk who continued to report to work to serve the seniors in her neighborhood until she fell ill.
A 27-year-old grocery store worker in Maryland who was devoted to helping people has died after contracting coronavirus, said her devastated family, who believe she was exposed to COVID-19 at work.
Leilani Jordan, whose mom Zenobia Shepherd lovingly referred to as “Butterfly,” was admitted to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on March 26, Shepherd wrote on a GoFundMe page. She died on April 1, according to the Washington Post and Fox affiliate WTTG.
Leilani’s brother Cedrick Jordan told WTTG that his sister, who worked as a greeter at a Giant supermarket in Largo, had cerebral palsy, and was considered the family’s “miracle baby.”
He said her symptoms were initially mild, and he was confident that she’d make a full recovery even after she was taken to the hospital.
“It was so fast. And I speak to my sister every day. When she was admitted, she was challenged, she was struggling with her respiratory health, and I could tell,” he said. “But it did not seem as severe as what it ended up being. And it just escalated so fast.” …
[Ms. Shepherd] said Leilani was particularly sympathetic to elderly customers, and felt strongly about continuing to go to work to help them out.
“She said, ‘Mommy, I’m going to work because no one else is going to help the senior citizens get their groceries.’ She only stopped going to work when she could no longer breathe,” Shepherd, who did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment, told the Post. …
The supermarket’s website outlines various precautions they’ve taken to protect employees as well, including plastic face shields for all associates and plexiglass shields at cash registers, pharmacies and customer service desks.
Her brother Cedrick warns that coronavirus comes on strong, and quickly.
“Do not take this lightly. COVID-19, do not think it’s a façade or it’s a joke because it’s not,” he told WTTG. “It’s severe. Be safe. I lost my best friend. Please be safe.”
As of Wednesday morning, there were 4,371 cases and 104 deaths attributed to coronavirus in Maryland, according to The New York Times. The United States, meanwhile, had 397,754 cases and 12,956 deaths attributed to the virus.
Glen Burnie, Maryland radio station WFBR-AM 1590 featured an important show on the afternoon of Thursday, April 9 from Mama Tomiko and Baba Ty of Aging People in Prison Human Rights Campaign, this time focusing on the current situation of coronavirus and its impact, specifically, on Afrikan people. Guests were Dr. Patricia Newton, noted Afrikan-centered medical doctor and psychiatrist, who provided important clinical analysis, and a special guest who had personally endured the grueling process of recovering from the coronavirus illness after having at one time believed the claims by some online pundits that “Black people are immune to COVID-19.” We have secured permission to share the audio of that program on this site and it can be listened to here:
This is perhaps the most dangerous of the pieces of disinformation about COVID-19. The behavior of many younger people (attending spring break and beach parties, defying shelter-in-place orders and congregating in groups without protection) was an indication of their personal belief that the crisis would not touch them, that they were “bulletproof”. To foist the completely unproven theory on Afrikan people that we are somehow immune to this disease, with absolutely no scientific evidence to support such a claim, is not far removed from the old Biblical cliché of “leading the lambs to slaughter”.
5. Is the media simply out to “get” the Trump Administration?
Trump has waged an ongoing battle with the press from the beginning, railing against what he has long called the “fake news media” ever since the contention over the number of attendees at his inauguration. After Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders finally resigned from their respective posts as White House Press Secretary, Trump himself has given press briefs at the coronavirus press events, which have often spent as much time lauding the achievements of his administration and arguing with reporters as discussing the current status of the outbreak.
An April 9, 2020 article from the National Review, Pence Blocks Fauci, Birx from Appearing on CNN after Network Stops Airing Full White House Coronavirus Briefings by Zachary Evans, April 9, 2020 (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pence-blocks-fauci-birx-from-appearing-on-cnn-after-network-stops-airing-full-white-house-coronavirus-briefings/), seems to highlight the ongoing struggle between the Trump administration and the so-called “fake news press”.
Vice President Mike Pence has blocked Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, as well as other top U.S. health officials, from appearing on CNN following the network’s decision to not air the White House coronavirus press briefings in full.
“When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials then you can expect them back on your air,” a spokesman for the vice president told CNN.
Trump and the White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Pence, have been giving daily briefings to the press for several weeks after rising numbers of Americans have been infected. A CNN executive said that the network has sometimes cut away from the briefings after Trump speaks, and turns to a panel to fact-check the president. However, the network usually broadcasts only the president’s question-and-answer session.
Fauci and Birx regularly appear at the briefings to give updates on the status of the coronavirus epidemic within the U.S. Fauci has also appeared on CNN virtual townhalls on the coronavirus for the past five weeks, but will not be present this Thursday.
The New York Times, another outlet that has been a target of the Trump administration’s ire, stopped airing the briefings on its website entirely.
“We stopped doing that because they were like campaign rallies,” Elisabeth Bumiller, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, told the Washington Post. “The health experts often have interesting information, so we’re very interested in that, but the president himself often does not.”
This story was also reported by the Washington Examiner (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pences-office-blocks-coronavirus-officials-from-going-on-cnn-over-briefing-coverage). A subsequent story on the Web site of The Hill by J. Edward Moreno, Pence reverses position barring coronavirus task force members from appearing on CNN: report (https://thehill.com/homenews/media/492120-pence-reverses-position-barring-coronavirus-task-force-members-from-appearing), indicated a reversal of this position, as did a follow-up story from CNN, White House reverses position after blocking health officials from appearing on CNN by Oliver Darcy (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/media/pence-office-tv-bookings-coronavirus/index.html).
6. Is All of this just a Hoax?
There seem to be several variations of this theory, depending on one’s perspective.
Is the alleged “hoax” being played to disadvantage the right-wing conservative movement, which sees itself as the true “voice of the people” (though mainly White people) and is represented, or so think certain corners of the working class White community, by the stubborn, anti-science, anti-globalist but strongly Eurocentric White supremacist current administration? Trump himself seemed to push this claim early in the outbreak as he spoke before one of the last public rallies he would hold before the pandemic finally became real to him. CNBC published the story Trump says the coronavirus is the Democrats’ ‘new hoax’, Fri, Feb 28 2020, Updated Sat, Feb 29 2020, by Thomas Franck (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/trump-says-the-coronavirus-is-the-democrats-new-hoax.html). Trump has since backed away from the “hoax” talk, but his critics who have noted his many unhelpful statements, especially early in the pandemic when he appeared to try to minimize its severity, and those who followed his early advice to their detriment are not likely to forget his misinformed remarks.
Or is the hoax being played on the “free thinkers” among the Afrikan-descendant community who see their anti-Black-orthodoxy and anti-elite attitudes as the real independent political force in the US? Among this group we find those who consider hospitals to be death traps and vaccines to be poisons, and that the reason why so many Afrikan-Descendants have died during the outbreak was their decision to go to the hospital rather than the combination of a pandemic and the structural inequalities in living conditions, employment and healthcare access that complicate all aspects of our susceptibility to and recovery from COVID-19 infection. There is much to be suspicious of regarding the safety of vaccines (see the next paragraph) and hospitals (many of us know of someone who apparently died in hospital under less-than-clear circumstances), but in the absence of advice from medical professionals we can trust, decisions we make will ultimately amount to playing the game of “Who Do You Believe”. The establishment of a Pan-Afrikan Scientific and Medical Commission, perhaps a slightly more “revolutionary Pan-Afrikan” version of the National Medical Association (http://www.nmanet.org/), the National Black Nurses Association, Inc. (http://www.nbna.org/), the Association of Black Women Physicians (http://www.blackwomenphysicians.org/) or the African American Health Professional Organization, could provide the community some important guidance in matters such as these.
Or, could the hoax be a roundabout attempt by nefarious forces to use what some see as a genetically-engineered bioweapon created in a lab to push the latest potentially-dangerous vaccine on an unsuspecting and historically-oppressed population? Afrika has been the theater for the development of vaccines in the past that have been either suspected or demonstrated to have subjected the people to detrimental health effects in the name of “science”. The current movement toward testing proposed vaccines for COVID-19 in Afrika has not gone unnoticed by Pan-Afrikan activists who will fight tooth and nail against efforts to turn the people of the Mother Continent into the West’s latest guinea pigs. One theory about the development of HIV was that simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) was transferred, either accidentally or intentionally, to humans in the vaccines for polio, which then mutated to the deadly human immunodeficiency virus we know today as the direct cause of AIDS. The US military is already known to have experimented with many biological pathogens in laboratories in places like Fort Detrick, Maryland to study their possible weaponization, from e. coli to anthrax to ricin to Ebola.
Resisting the Hype
We have attempted to discuss some of the more pervasive claims that have too often led our people down the garden path to their own destruction. We recognize that we ourselves are not immune to being deceived by what appears to be truth, and thus we recommend the concerned and curious reader to check out the links in this article, look for exceptions and counterpoints to what we have shared here, and make a conscientious, reasoned, thorough analysis and argument that may dispel even what we have presented above. There has been a lot of disinformation placed in social media, in the halls of government officials, in the offices of the corporate bosses and in parts of the mass media. This disinformation is sometimes motivated by the desire some people have to appear “smarter” than everyone else by possessing alleged information and wisdom others do not. Some of the purveyors of these rumors, errors and lies may truly be convinced of the truth of what they are saying and writing because they trust whatever sources provided them with the information. And still others may simply like to see the rabble of humanity scurry about in confused desperation as the world burns around them. If humanity is to survive this pandemic with minimal loss of life or disruption to global civil society, the disinformation must end, those who create or proliferate the disinformation must be stopped, and accurate, verifiable information must be made available to the people. For Afrikan people, we must find and consult those among our learned scholars and Elders who truly know the secrets of science and medicine, of technology and geopolitics, of epidemiology and ethics, and consult their wisdom rather than the motives of those who would have us all dancing wildly to their tune like crack-addicted marionettes. The confusion and panic brought on by the rumor mill, the lies and the unverified conspiracy theories is a violation of the people’s right to know and a violation of Ma’at.
To those of you who see yourselves among the group of political-spinners, self-promoting know-it-alls, rumor-spreaders and fear-mongers, stop it. Now.