SARS conspiracy theory

The SARS conspiracy theory began to emerge during the SARS outbreak in China in the spring of 2003, when a Russian scientist and a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Sergei Kolesnikov, first exposed to the public that the SARS virus is a synthesis of measles and infectious parotiditis. This compound cannot be formed in the natural world and thus, according to him, that SARS virus must be produced under laboratory conditions. Another Russian scientist, Nikolai Filatov, head of Moscow's epidemiological services, has also commented ealier that SARS virus is likely to be man-made.

This news caused quite a stir in many Chinese Internet discussion boards and chat rooms. Many Chinese thus believed that the SARS virus could be a biological weapon manufactured by the United States, who perceived China's rise as a potential threat to its dominance and superiority in the world. The failure to find the source of the SARS virus further convinced these people and many more that SARS is artificially synthesised and spread by some indivduals and even governments. (Initial findings suggest that the SARS virus could come from civet cats, a type of animal that is often killed and eaten in Guangdong, where SARS was first discovered. However further studies show that this finding cannot be confirmed.)

Some people in Taiwan and the United States also expressed doubts and speculations that SARS could be a biological weapon developed by mainland China.

Supporters of the conspiracy theory suggest that SARS caused the most serious harms in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, countries where most Chinese reside. While the United States, Europe and Japan were not much affected. They further point out that while SARS has an average mortality rate of around 10% around the wolrd, but curiously in the United States no one died from SARS, despite that there were 71 reported cases. The United States government has twice officially denied that it has any relationship to the development and spread of SARS virus.

In October 2003, Tong Zeng, a Chinese lawyer and a volunteer in a Sino-US medical cooperation programme in 1998, published a book that again raises the speculation that SARS could be a biological weapon developed by the United States against China. In the book, Tong disclosed that in the 1990s, many American research groups have collected thousands of blood and DNA samples and specimens of mainland Chinese (including 5000 DNA samples from twins) through numerous joint research projects carried out in China. These samples were then sent back to the United States for further research, and could be used in developing biological weapons targeting Chinese. These samples came from 22 provinces in China, all of which were hit by SARS in 2003. Only provinces like Yunnan, Guizhou, Hainan, Tibet and Xinjiang were left out, and all these provinces suffered less severely during the SARS outbreak. The author also suspects that Japan is also involved, as many Japanese factories in Guangdong in the 1990s made it compulsory for all workers to have blood tests in the factory annually, rather than asking workers to go to local hospitals for blood tests and proper body check-up. However Tong Zeng admits that these are only speculations, and he does not have any concrete proofs from the study of genetic sequence of the virus.

Most experts in China now believe that the conspiracy theory is baseless. They use the genetic sequence of the SARS virus as a proof that it is not man made, as there is not the slightest trace in the genetic code to show that it is artificially developed. However some also acknowledge that the possibility of a man-made SARS virus does exist, and some scientists also noticed that there is still genetic material in the sequence that does not match any other already known virus, implying that it could be a man made virus. Notably, an expert from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of China, Hou Yunde, who initially denied that SARS could be man made, later admitted in a SARS seminar held by Ministry of Health of PRC in December 2003 that there is a possibility that it is man made.

See also: biological warfare, SARS, SARS virus