Debunking Zika

The Zika virus is real, and it is a danger to unborn children. What it is not, however, is a US government-dispersed bioweapon.

That is the case which has been made by some contemporary conspiracy theorists, who found their champion in Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois.

I apologize for subjecting you to Alex Jones, but this is one of the events that triggered the theory:

Note: Professor Boyle is, absolutely an expert… on international law. He was the primary writer for the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. His action there was as a lawyer considering how to address the threats and repercussions of biological weapons. It neither confers upon him, nor has he ever indicated any history of learning, the mechanisms of designing a biological weapon.

This would be akin to someone who has read a slew of comic books explaining the method of ink color selection used by an artist. An expert on international law is not in any way an expert on microscopic bioengineering. That simple fact is ignored by the conspiracy propagators.

Instead, it was used to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment.

Professor Boyle’s statement on the Zika virus is now being reinforced by two separate investigative journalists. One of them is Jerome Corsi, who writes for WND.com. Corsi however, raises another caveat to the Zika virus case as he explains that Zika could be another case of a disease being spread by illegal immigrants that have entered Latin America, the United States and Europe and whose origin is Africa and the Middle East.

real-agenda.com

Calling Corsi an investigative journalist is simply wrong. For years the second-in-command at InfoWars, he specializes in furthering conspiracy theory for political gain. He was also the primary driver behind popularizing “Deep State” and was Person 1 in the Roger Stone indictment.

As a mosquito-borne illness that often shows no symptoms in adults, Zika does have some worrisome transmission vector aspects. It can be carried by someone who is then bitten by a carrier mosquito; upon subsequent bites, the infected mosquito can transmit the virus. Considering the proliferation of legal African immigrants in the areas where it has been found in the United States, however, and the disease’s origin in tropical Africa, the greatest likelihood of its introduction into America was from legal African immigrants, not from Africans and Middle Easterners hidden among the people attempting to cross the Southern border illegally.

What makes the myth inviting, however, is an actual history the United States has of testing mosquitoes as a delivery system for a biological agent. In this case, it was yellow fever.

Between 1956 and 1958, the United States Army conducted a number of test releases of mosquitoes in Georgia and Florida. The tests were meant to determine the likelihood that an infected insect would get into a home after dispersal, and what percentage of mosquitoes would survive being delivered to an area via a specialized artillery shell.

The full details of these tests were provided in the Summary of Major Events and Problems by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, Fiscal Year 1959. At page 102 they explain why using yellow fever as a weapon could be effective and in the following pages they detail their testing.

Subsequent summaries by the same department have indicated no further testing was performed along those lines.

On the surface, it seems plausible, if not certain: the U.S. has the capability to manufacture bioweapons. We did investigate the use of mosquitoes as a delivery system for weapons. We have a university Professor who wrote an anti-bioweapon act saying he believes it’s a bioweapon. And we have journalists backing him up.

Dig just below the surface, though, and we find that the last known research was sixty years ago, the Professor has no expertise or even minor experience with bio-engineering, and the journalists have a history of ethical work on a par with Jayson Blair.

That’s not “truth”. It’s fearmongering and using an actual crisis to further a politically useful fiction.

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About AlienMotives 1991 Articles
Ex-Navy Reactor Operator turned bookseller. Father of an amazing girl and husband to an amazing wife. Tired of willful political blindness, but never tired of politics. Hopeful for the future.