Via Arabian Business: 'Plausible' that MERS was developed as bio-weapon. Excerpt and then a comment:
A Saudi ministry of health official has said it’s plausible that Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus was developed as a biological weapon.
Arab News reports that Abdullah Asiri, the ministry’s undersecretary for preventive health, said the fact that the source of the virus was still unknown and that it has limited geographic spread, it should not rule out the possibility of it having been developed as a weapon.
Asiri said that the ministry of health would have to verify any information suggested it was developed as a weapon.
He said despite the virus being in existence for 30 years in Saudi Arabia, the first case of it spreading to humans was reported four years ago. Asiri said that 74 percent of camels have antibodies for MERS, which he said would indicate that the camels were infected at some point in their lives.
This story is evidence that bullshit abhors a news vacuum, and will rush in to fill it.
The Saudi authorities have consistently dealt with the MERS problem on the Hawkeye Pierce principle: "Never let it be said I didn't do the least I could possibly do."
They discourage publication of scientific information on MERS, and release the bare minimum about new cases, recoveries, and deaths. Compared to the flood of H7N9 reports out of China (at least at first), Saudi scientific reports on MERS have been a trickle. We have arguably learned more about MERS from South Korea since last spring, than we have learned from the Saudis since 2012.
Even two years ago I was picking up back-channel signals that the Saudis were stonewalling international health agencies, and improvements since then have been mostly cosmetic: sack a health minister once in a while, and post those stupid little reports every day on the KSA MOH MERS page. Nothing has changed.
The Saudis seem to see MERS as a problem in marketing the Haj, which must bring in a tidy rial or two every year. When it's losing megafortunes to maintain market share in the global oil market by driving down the price of crude, the Haj is important. So soft-pedalling MERS and bragging about rigorous health screening of pilgrims provide the key Saudi talking points.
Meanwhile a MERS outbreak rages through the capital's hospitals, killing older patients with the misfortune of needing treatment for other diseases—not to mention the expatriate healthcare workers who do the Saudis' dirty work.
Just imagine what the Americans would do if a comparable MERS outbreak were burning through Walter Reed National Military Medical Center—seriously, you imagine it, because I don't want to think about the political mega-typhoon that would follow.
But the gerontocrats who run the House of Saud can suppress both news and scientific information about the disease that's killing their own people, and get away with a reasonable facsimile of murder.
Lacking any reasonable information, the tame Saudi media pull this "bio-weapon" idea out of the air. As the author of several disaster novels, I can tell them that no editor would ever buy it.
First, an interesting virus would have turned up in the literature years before some psychopathic scientist pitched his masters on weaponizing it. We have nothing on MERS before the Zarqa nosocomial outbreak in Jordan in the spring of 2012.
Second, what's the point of weaponizing a virus that knocks out decrepit Saudis with kidney failure or diabetes, and their luckless Filipino nurses? An editor would suggest: Tailor this sucker to the DNA of the House of Saud, and now we're talking blockbuster. Alas, MERS fails again.
Third, you don't release a bioweapon unless you've got an antidote for your own people. Developing a vaccine or antiviral drug would require a long, expensive, and very public process; the global health community has loudly complained about the lack of such a vaccine or antiviral.
But if you consider the deaths of your own old folks and hired help as a cost of doing business, then floating stories about MERS as bioweapon would be a convenient distraction from the public-health disaster you were accepting and thereby promoting.
This is a country, after all, that in the 21st century still beheads people for sorcery—and its western friends let the Saudis get away with it.
Until WHO and other major health agencies call bullshit on the Saudis, and declare MERS a PHEIC requiring a shutdown of the Haj, a crappy little camel virus will continue to infect and kill people with the misfortune to be living under a government that is itself a hazard to global health.
