This Stupid Virus

If COVID was developed as a bioweapon, what was it for?

I’ve been sitting on this train of thought for a while. I can’t tell if it’s crazy or not, so I’ve hesitated to write it up. But I can’t quite dismiss this scenario out of hand, either.

So be warned. Dot-connecting schizopost incoming.

Antonin Herelle

Now that the dust has settled from Corona, no one much wants to talk about it anymore. The normies who all went full Jonestown along with the Branch Covidians seem quietly embarrassed and reluctant to broach the subject, lest others be reminded of their rabid enthusiasm for masks, lockdowns, and forcing experimental gene therapies into children’s arms. Likely some degree of growing disquiet over what they allowed into their cells plays a role there, too. The people who drove the normies mad in the first place especially don’t want to dwell on the doom coof, lest they draw attention to their menticidal war crimes. Even the conspiracy theorists aren’t terribly interested in talking about it, out of sheer exhaustion with the topic if nothing else. We’ve all been through hell and it’s not something anyone wants to wade through for the millionth time. Bringing it up feels like picking at old scabs. Like Germans after WWII, everyone sort of recognizes that asking what their friends were doing a few years ago risks an awkward conversation that no one wants to have.

It’s a weird kind of denial that’s taken hold. One aspect of this denial has been getting prevalent on the weird side of the Internet – the growing number of people arguing that there was nothing real underlying the plandemic measures, that the whole thing was a holographic projection of the corporate media.

There are the no-virus people, of course, who hold to the position that illness is all down to one’s ‘terrain’ or body ... a somewhat circular argument that one’s health is a result of one’s health. I’m being a bit facetious there – the role of toxins plays a key role in their model, and environmental toxicity is by far the dominant source of illness in our world. The no-virus people have yet to explain contagion, however. Toxins don’t replicate. Until they explain why, for example, I tend to catch a cold after hanging around with someone who has a cold, I’m afraid they’ll have a hard time convincing me that viruses are the twentieth century’s phlogiston, no matter how much autistic detail they go into about Koch’s postulates or electron microscopy or whatever.

The other form of denial is more limited. Viruses, this line of argument goes, may exist, but COVID-19 did not. It was, they say, literally just the flu, or the common cold. There was nothing novel about it. The PCR and rapid antigen tests were all fraudulent, the virus itself never existed, and the excess death spikes were all due to the treatments and public health strategies: lockdowns, ventilators, remdesivir, shutting the infected elderly up in crowded care homes, and so on.

It follows from this interpretation that the recent normalization of the lab leak hypothesis is just more scare-mongering. Renegade journalist James Delingpole gave what I think is a reasonably thorough and concise treatment of this position in his recent essay, So you think you had a novel, bio-engineered, lab-leaked virus?

Now, I like James, his podcast is consistently interesting and I listen to it quite often, but I think he’s got the wrong of it, here.

A large part of his argument comes down to suggestibility. The idea is that with our sensoria being saturation-bombed with panic propaganda, every time someone would come down with the sniffles, they’d assume it was COVID. Supposedly novel symptoms, such as the loss of smell or ‘long COVID’ brainfog and the like, are psychosomatic. The positive tests are just down to the testing kits being so hypersensitive that they’ll report COVID RNA more or less randomly.

Arguing against this requires a bit of subtlety on my part, because I agree with a lot of this. The PCR tests were absurdly over-sensitive, enabling the authorities to detect exactly as much COVID-19 as they wanted to detect. There’s no question that the insane social interventions and counter-productive treatments contributed significantly to the death toll. And of course, people are extremely suggestible – the nocebo effect is a real thing.

However, I’m pretty sure the COVID-19 virus is real, and I’m pretty sure it came from a lab.

My own personal experience is quite enough to convince me of the former. I’ve had the virus twice, and each time it was like no cold or flu that I’ve ever had. The second time, last September, was the worst. I tested positive on the day I fell ill, and negative a few days later when the symptoms had cleared up. At the time I described it as like getting hit by a truck. That’s hyperbole, but the point is it hurt.

Alena Aenami

The first time I had COVID was at the beginning of January 2020, before anyone who didn’t live in Wuhan – myself included – had even heard of Wuhan. I remember lying there on New Year’s Eve, sick as a dog and pissed that I was missing the party, thinking to myself “Well this is a bad omen for 2020.” Hah. At any rate, that was much too early for suggestibility to play a role. At the time I thought it was the strangest, and one of the most miserable, flus that I’d ever had. Only a few months later, as the symptom profile of the virus came into focus, did it become clear to me that I’d almost certainly had COVID.

As to its origin in a lab, enough virologists have remarked on the bizarre features of the furin cleavage site, the cytotoxic spike protein, and various aspects of the viral genome to make a reasonable case in my mind at least that they’re not talking nonsense. Combine that with the presence of a biosafety lab in Wuhan, a long organizational paper trail of grant applications and funding allocations and peer-reviewed publications relating to gain of function research, a biowarfare facility in Fort Detrick, the emails revealing the attempt by that little goblin Fauci and his merry band of lickspittle lab trolls to squelch all talk of gain of function research or lab leaks, and years of censorship and mockery of the lab leak scenario by every official regime organ. That’s a lot of smoke if there’s no fire.

If the virus started its life as a computer model, the obvious question is what the purpose of the project ultimately was. The public justification for gain of function research is that by creating dangerous novel pathogens, scientists can study their effects and figure out defenses against them. This is a less than compelling argument (we wouldn’t need defenses in the first place if no one made the damn things), which may be why such research was officially banned. In any case, that justification sounds like a minimally compelling cover story to me.

The most obvious motivation to develop artificial pathogens is military.

The strongest argument against COVID-19 being a recombinant weaponized virus is that it isn’t exactly the apocalyptic engineered flu from Stephen King’s The Stand, which wiped out 99% of the world’s population. Airborne ebola it ain’t. It wasn’t another Black Death. It didn’t even rise to the level of the Spanish Flu. What kind of lousy bioweapon has a piddling infection fatality rate of the order of 0.01%, with the only people who die in any notable numbers from it being senior citizens who have already exceeded the median life expectancy? That’s the sort of bioweapon that only government accountants concerned about unfunded liabilities could love. Ahem.

If the rona was intended to murder vast swathes of the population, these black program genetic engineers are clearly terrible at their jobs.

Although that raises an obvious question.

Why should a bioweapon be designed to kill people?

Not all weapons are meant to be lethal. There are plenty of less-than-lethal armaments in the riot cop’s repertoire: billy clubs, pepper spray, tasers, rubber bullets, plastic bullets, tear gas, beanbag rounds, and the microwave-broadcasting Active Denial System pain ray.

Killing isn’t even necessarily the goal in military conflict. Unlike the old 7.62 round that blew a nice big hole in the target, the wimpy 5.56 NATO round isn’t really intended to murder the enemy. It’s meant to badly wound them. A dead soldier removes one dead soldier from the battlefield. A wounded soldier removes three, since two of his buddies have to drag him out, and afterwards he burdens the enemy’s medical resources.

So, COVID.

Anthony Catillaz

One argument I’ve heard is that COVID was basically just designed to be highly contagious and cause relatively mild symptoms, which would then provide the necessary pretext for the lockdowns and the motivation for vaccine mandates. In this scenario, getting that mRNA and the spike protein it codes for into everyone’s bloodstreams was the point all along ... that, and maybe provide something to blame the coming implosion of the financial system on. The main problem I have with that explanation is that COVID seems over-engineered for such a limited purpose.

So what about the actual effects of COVID-19 on the human body?

One of the most remarked-upon, weird symptoms associated with COVID-19 is anosmia – the loss of smell. This isn’t the usual side-effect of stuffed up nasal passages, which aren’t generally a COVID symptom. Rather, it seems to be neurological.

Neurological symptoms aren’t limited to anosmia, either. There can also be nasty headaches that don’t respond to aspirin or ibuprofen (ask me how I know). Then there’s the well-known brain fog, fatigue, and depression that comprise the nebulous ‘long COVID’.

I know some people don’t think long COVID is a real thing. I was once a skeptic, but am no longer so sure. After the last time I had it, I felt nebulously off for several weeks afterwards. It wasn’t anything particularly specific. I wasn’t forgetting my own name, or dropping things constantly, or tripping over my own shoes, or anything incredibly obvious like that. It was much more subtle than this. Where words and ideas would formerly flow like water, my thoughts felt sludgy and dull. The sparkle was gone. It was like I was trying to cut with a knife whose razor’s edge had been blunted, trying to see through a lens that had been clouded with fog.

If it had just been me, I’d have thought nothing much of it. Like I said, it was a subtle effect ... I doubt anyone talking to me would even have noticed. But it wasn’t only me. Millions of people around the world have been reporting the same lingering intellectual malaise following a bout of the rona.

That got me thinking.

What if this neurological muffling is the goal?

I realize this sounds like a wacky science fiction scenario, but I’m not so sure it is. We’re living in an age of GMO crops, edible tumours a.k.a. lab-grown meat, AIs that are giving the Turing Test a run for its money, autonomous drones, brain-computer interfaces, jet packs, and self-driving cars. An experimental gene therapy concoction was just injected into the arms of billions of people. This is the 21^st century, after all. Is a virus that makes people stupid beyond our capabilities?

The motivation for a state actor to develop such a weapon should be clear on the face of it. Per capita national GDP is a highly sensitive function of average national IQ. A few points is the difference between a wealthy, organized, clean, smoothly running society, and a poor, corrupt, dirty, dysfunctional shithole.

Say the US wanted to slow down the development of a rising rival. China, for example. A virus that made the population subtly dumber would be just the thing. Is it an accident that the first large-scale outbreak was in China? Most people point to the Wuhan biosafety lab as the likely origin point, and indeed they were researching coronaviruses there, or at least so I’ve heard. However, others have pointed out that just a few months before the outbreak was detected, Wuhan hosted the military games. The American soldiers who attended reportedly all got sick. Could they have been deliberately infected with something cooked up at the Fort Detrick lab? Along these lines, it may not be accidental that Iran was one of the first countries to experience an outbreak.

Sebastian Smarowski

What makes germ war effective is that germs spread, which is also what makes germ war tricky. Once released, the nasties are likely to infect your own population, as well. So, the conventional thinking goes, you don’t want to actually release such a weapon until you’re reasonably confident that you’ve got a cure or a vaccine, otherwise you end up just as damaged or dead as the target population.

The mRNA shots don’t actually seem to do very much to prevent either the spread or the symptoms of COVID; if anything, arguably, they just make them worse while destroying people’s immunity. So it’s a reasonable assumption that whoever released this did so without having a defense on hand ... at least not one they were prepared to share with the public.

I think that reduces the possibility that COVID-19 was an attack by the US military on China (and Iran), with the limited goal of hurting their rival’s economy and thereby delaying its rise to global prominence. Without some sort of defense, releasing such a weapon is all downside risk (the likely diplomatic and moral blowback) with no upside benefit (if the whole world is similarly affected, including your own population, you’ve gained no strategic advantage).

So then, who?

I think we can make a reasonable guess as to who.

As to why, if there’s one thing the wannabe demiurges of our larval prison planet love, it is control.

Domesticating humans is no easy task. To make their job easier, they attack us in many ways. They pollute our minds and souls with bad ideas – warped ideologies, misinterpreted religions, propaganda in news and entertainment media, emotional conditioning in the schools, and so on. They encourage the use of various drugs, both medical and recreational, that dull the mind, SSRIs and marijuana being especially popular of late. They adulterate the food supply with all sorts of poisons. They fluoridate the water. It’s a long list.

The problem with all of these is that a clever human can avoid them. You can shut out the propaganda, not smoke the bud, not eat the toxic seed oils, filter the water.

But it’s almost impossible to avoid a virus.

So let’s say you intend to take over the planet through deception. You know, like a Great Reset, Agenda 2030 type of game plan. One of your main problems is that it’s essentially certain that not everyone will fall for the guilt trips and saccharine promises with which you intend to prod and lure them into the technetronic control grid. You can only fool all of the people some of the time, and for this to work you need to fool essentially all of the people for quite some considerable amount of time.

Smart humans are more likely to clue in to what you’re doing, and warn others. You can do what you can to censor the social media platforms, but that’s a stopgap measure at best. Even the Soviets couldn’t stop samizdat from circulating. You can socially engineer the population to adopt an authoritarian, intolerant epistemology, but this makes their minds brittle and the ones unaffected by that conditioning end up with a huge cognitive advantage compared to your unwitting minions.

But what if you can release something that makes everyone a little bit stupider?

Stefan Koidl

You’re not looking to turn your targets into drooling imbeciles. That would be too obvious, besides which, permanently brain-fried morons are of no use in putting the finishing touches on the control grid. You need people to get a little bit dumber, not a lot. It needs to be subtle.

You’re just looking to dull their wits a tiny bit. Make them a little slower to catch on.

It doesn’t need to be a huge effect. Shaving a few points off the IQ of the population might be barely noticeable at the individual level, but could reasonably be expected to have significant effects at the general population scale, just as it does with national GDP.

It doesn’t even need to affect everyone at once, nor does it necessarily need to be permanent. Enstupidating several percent of the population for a month or two at a time as the epidemiological waves move through the herd will slow their minds down enough, on average, to keep the herd from catching on.

But then why all the hysteria about stopping the spread? Surely they’d have wanted the virus to spread, no?

Well of course they did. You didn’t really think the lockdowns were about flattening curves, did you? You must have noticed that they also did everything in their power to prevent any sort of effective treatment or prophylactic being used – hydroxychloroquine, invermectin, vitamin D, all of it was ‘debunked’, restricted, even banned. Far from trying to prevent the spread, they seem to have done everything they could to prevent people from effectively defending themselves against it.

But wouldn’t they be worried about catching the bedumbening viral load themselves?

Probably. It’s certainly possible that they had an actual vaccine, which was made available only to the inner circle. On the other hand, it’s possible they didn’t, and that this was a risk they were willing to take. The masters of our world are not in the positions they are because they are towering geniuses. They have power because they have more money than God. With that sort of wealth, you don’t need to be smart. Indeed many of them quite obviously aren’t. It might be that they were willing to take the hit.

So, why release it in China? This is also obvious. Release it in a city with a large biosafety lab, and the natural assumption is that it came from that lab. Denounce this reasonable inference as a conspiracy theory, and the conspiracy theorists will latch onto it, as indeed they did. After a while, the artificial origin of the virus becomes harder to deny, so the media admits it was ‘leaked’ from a lab. Once again the normies are satisfied, and they can continue blaming China. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists will poke a little deeper, as they do, and start pointing the finger at the military games in Wuhan and the possible connection to Fort Detrick. Now the counter-narrative to the mainstream narrative is that it was the US what done it, as an attack on China ... which version of things the Chinese will be quite happy to amplify.

In other words, by releasing it in Wuhan, nested cover stories are created, which shield the identities of the actual perpetrators. Who, all the while, are busily working to fold the collapsing global economy into their CBDC-powered, algorithmically managed, renewably starved beast system.

Once again, I know this sounds outlandish. But also once again, we’ve got AIs passing the MCAT with flying colours now, so who’s to say what ‘outlandish’ is in the Current Year?

I’m not saying that making people dumber is definitely what the purpose of COVID-19 was. I have no idea what it was designed to do; and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know for sure that the virus was definitely designed, or if so that it was definitely designed as a weapon. I’m just putting together the pieces in front of me. We’ve got a virus that looks like it was the product of a long-running, lavishly funded, secretive global research program. In terms of lethality that virus is a nothingburger. That virus regularly produces neurological symptoms, that no one recalls having experienced from a virus before, which feel a lot like getting stupider. All of this in the context of a globalist elite who repeatedly and at length tell us that they intend to impoverish and enslave us, who already work in multiple ways to degrade the intelligence of the human species, and who have been moving full speed ahead with their project ever since the virus was released.

Maybe that’s all coincidence, and I’m putting the pieces together incorrectly. I don’t know. But I haven’t seen the dots connected like this, yet, so I thought I’d put it out there to see what people make of it. As always, feel free to tell me I’m a lunatic in the comments.

If you’re already a paid supporter of Postcards From Barsoom, you have my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude. Your support makes my writing possible. If you enjoyed this essay, or you’ve enjoyed previous essays, and you have the resources to do so, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. If you take out a paid sub, you might even develop superpowers. What is certain, however, is that a paid sub gets you in to Deimos Station.

In between writing on Substack you can find me on Twitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active at Telegrams From Barsoom

Joakim Ericsson