The COVID-19 abuses are still fresh on our minds. Even with the JFK, RFK and Epstein revelations, and I for one never trusted the vaccine industry in the plague’s aftermath. Modern researchers of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, which left 550 million dead, say sloppy pharma corps were responsible for that fiasco.

By Emad Aysha
It seems the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research vaccine work led to that outbreak (consult Dr. Stanton Hom), which is curiously like new information coming out about COVID. Well, I've always been suspicious since COVID sounds so much like SARS, which also comes from China.

I initially thought that the pundits had confused the two, only for a Jeffrey Sachs interview to reveal that the protein shell that makes COVID so formidable is taken from a SARS virus variant. And that the US biotech cartels were most likely the people who did the gene-splicing between the coronavirus and SARS.

The Greyzone interview exonerated bats and puts the blame instead on Dick Cheney! (This guy shows up everywhere, and he's no fan of Trump). The question is, what motivated such a foolhardy thing? Activists are talking and researching this, but science fiction is just as valid a source for me.

One option comes from Mission: Impossible II (2000). In it, a pharmaceutical corporation in Australia creates an incredibly concentrated flu virus to develop a vaccine early for the marketplace when the seasonal flu hits.

It seems ludicrous, but it isn’t. Again, look at Spanish flu during WWI, and East Asia is the perfect candidate. Read Stephen King's stories; you will get killer flu from Hong Kong.

In his novel The Stand, the US military engineered a flu that killed most of mankind. Australia is on the frontline of it all. (The same goes for Station Eleven, if you remember.) And where did bird and swine flu come from, in the end?

That means the regular flu season is the perfect cover for anybody who wants to harvest, modify and then release it discreetly. This accusation has been made by the Chinese recently, saying there’s evidence of Covid in the US before the so-called Wuhan outbreak.

There’s some trace of this in science fiction, given the Dean Koontz novel The Eyes of Darkness (1981), which has the aptly named Wuhan-400 virus, a bioengineered virus brought to the US by a Chinese defector. So, again, it’s the US that’s the ultimate culprit.

So we have the second biowarfare option. In the current charged political atmosphere, Western geopolitics is focused first on weakening Russia as a leapfrogging strategy for isolating and weakening China. A viral weapon is perfect for that.

Again, this is not as outlandish as you think since, in King’s The Stand, when the Pentagon fails to stop the virus spreading in the US, it decides to ‘share’ it with Russia and China to prevent those superpowers from filling the vacuum left by the US.

There’s an old spy/sci-fi story with a biowar scenario like that in it, but I’ll leave that to another article. Then there’s the third and most outlandish SF option: the apocalypse.

I’m talking about a childhood favourite movie I re-watched sometime recently, entirely out of the blue – The Satan Bug (1965). Here, a top-secret facility in the US is penetrated, and one of the viruses stolen was designed to kill all animal life on Earth.

How would such a thing be made, and who would be dumb or mad enough to steal it? The hero who is brought in to help the authorities explains it very plainly. It is not a foreign intelligence agency or organised crime outfit, but the thing the US specialises in.

Namely, Messiahs, of the extreme left-wing and right-wing variety. The original novel the movie was adapted from was by Alistair MacLean, with an environmentalist stealing the virus to blackmail the superpowers into nuclear disarmament.

OUTBREAKS IN STYLE: 'The Satan Bug' (1965) was my first experience with viruses of the fictional kind. Alas, there's always been an overlap between science fiction and spy fiction.

That’s quite close to the movie's theme, with the paranoid villain who stole it making an explicit comparison between the Satan Bug and Oppenheimer; the possibility that the first nuclear detonation could have caused a continuous chemical reaction that would have burned off the entire atmosphere.

Fear of the bomb, radiation, and nuclear war manifested itself in all sorts of ways during the Cold War, including fear of mutations, with giant ants, spiders and praying mantises or cannibal Zombie humans glowing green.

With the end of the Cold War, the fear of radiation abated, and proper biological anxieties took place. Spider-Man in the original comic was bitten by a radioactive spider, but in the Sam Raimi movie, it was a genetically engineered spider.

Daredevil also gets his super sense from radiation, but in the Ben Affleck movie, he gets his powers from a biohazard crate that he rams into.

To finish off on a positive note, SF might even give us a way out. In the Canadian horror flick Blue Monkey (1987), some weird plant-based bacterial infection births a giant insect (don’t ask me how), and one of the first people exposed amazingly survives.

She’s an old lady, and yet the toxins produced by the bacteria don’t kill her. The reason is another old lady at the hospital who insists they both get drunk during the lockdown/quarantine of their hospital, and the alcohol saves her.

ON THE ROCKS: Even Canadians have been bitten by the Cold War bug, with a convoluted plot that can't decide whether to call an insect an insect, or a blue monkey!

Well, amazingly enough, guess what we took to school? One way that people cured themselves from the flu pandemic during WWI was… binge drinking!

Never underestimate the power of homely cures like chicken soup, lemonade, garlic, black seed oil, etc. If high-tech can create a problem, sometimes it isn’t qualified to solve it. Low-tech is the way to go, something equally true of special effects as medical solutions in everyday life. (David Lynch's Dune again).

Oh, and national healthcare is a low-tech solution, too. Early diagnosis, early treatment—that’s just another word for anticipation, which is what science fiction is all about.