Did China Hide the Truth on SARS?

by John Thompson

May 11, 2003

Has SARS scared you yet? It should even though the threat of SARS in Toronto has abated — just for now. As communicable as the common cold, and much deadlier, both we and the world have had a lucky escape. Hopefully, the remaining pockets of infection in China will soon be under control.

The last big epidemic that surged over the world was the 1918-19 Influenza outbreak. It killed 30 million people around the world in about a year, which, considering that the recently concluded First World War had taken four years to kill 14 million people, should give one a clear idea of just how deadly an epidemic really can be. Had SARS really broken loose and galloped free, the full death toll around the planet might have easily reached 100 million people.

Humanity is right to fear epidemics, they are deadlier killers than any other force in history. The real agent for kicking off the Dark Ages was a double barreled assault by the epidemics that made the Roman Empire go broke in the Third Century AD, and the vicious plague that roamed the World in the Sixth Century as everyone in the Northern Hemisphere staggered out of three years of famine in the aftermath of what was probably a catastrophic volcanic explosion in 535.

The stable social order of Medieval Europe was kicked apart by the Bubonic Plague — a force that killed somewhere between 33 and 50% of the entire population. Never mind steel and gunpowder, what really made the European settlement of the Americas possible was the overwhelming impact of Old World diseases like smallpox, measles, and cholera. Outbreaks of these were horrible for Europeans, but a ‘virgin field epidemic’ in a hitherto unexposed population can kill upwards of 90% of a defenceless people.

There are some additional matters to consider. The Corona virus associated with SARS has cousins in the virus that causes measles — yet it acts like the common cold on steroids and killed something between 5-10% of all who caught it. All in all, it was highly communicable and one doctor’s stay on a hotel floor in Hong Kong allowed SARS to escape China and menace the world.

There is also one matter for suspicion, and one matter for concern regarding China and SARS — and a reasonable answer on either issue is not likely to be forthcoming.

The corona virus behind SARS is not behaving quite like its close cousins — for a start, where is the skin rash? Measles can also cause sterility in adults, might SARS do likewise? These are two questions that have yet to be publicly addressed. SARS does act like an influenza, and many other ‘flus have arisen out of China, but it is so radically different. It is possible that SARS might have been an engineered virus… in other words, a bioweapon.

The World Health Organization has also taken China to task for its reticence about the outbreak of the disease in January and February of this year. There are two possible reasons for this. If SARS was a created bioweapon, it is very likely that China might have developed it — the Western World does not engage in offensive biological warfare programs and anyone else who might develop such weapons would be more likely to unleash them on the US or in Europe first. Bioweapons are notorious for ‘own goal’ hits when they escape — a fact testified by the dozens of deaths from Anthrax in Sverdlosk in 1979.

A more probable explanation than bioweapon conspiracy theories (valid as they may be) lies with the traditional Asian concept of ‘face’ and the traditional secretiveness of ‘progressive’ governments. China is desperate for recognition, tourism, trade and international status. Having an outbreak of a deadly disease threatens all of these and makes Beijing feel embarrassed that such a thing could happen there.

In the sordid history of the Soviet Union, there was almost an official policy that accidents could not happen in a Socialist system. Which meant that, since accidents could not happen, when they did occur the contradiction had to be resolved by ignoring them. Aircraft crashes, radioactive leaks, missing submarines, industrial spills, even an accidental nuclear explosion — if no Westerners noticed, then they didn’t really occur. China sometimes behaves the same way, and it looks like they tried to get away with it when SARS first appeared.

With SARS, one hopes China was just behaving stupidly. If there was a more sinister motive behind their behavior we might see SARS again.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca