With the world distracted by the coronavirus pandemic that emerged from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, China has stealthily unleashed its expansionist designs, aggressively asserting the numerous overlapping territorial claims it has with at least 14 of its neighbours.
In the last few months, China had sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat in the disputed South China Sea, persistently harassed a Malaysian offshore oil rig, threatened Taiwan with an attack, tightened its grips on Hong Kong by passing a controversial national security law and flexed muscles with India along the LAC in Eastern Ladakh.
Recently, the simmering tensions along the Line of Actual Control in India’s Ladakh aggravated when a platoon of 400-500 PLA troops was halted by the vigilant Indian Army from encroaching upon the Indian territory.
As China has exploited the coronavirus pandemic to pursue its aggressive expansionism, several reports that have emerged give credence to the speculations that Beijing might have waged deliberate biological warfare to throw the world into chaos. China’s surprisingly low numbers of coronavirus infection and its subjugation of the raging pandemic has only added to the rumours that the pandemic might be a part of China’s biological warfare.
Australian journalist claimed Pakistan-China had entered a covert deal to develop bio-warfare capabilities
These suspicions were given further prominence by Australian journalist Anthony Klan, who in July this year, published a report, claiming that China and Pakistan had entered into a “secret three-year deal” to augment potential bio-warfare capabilities, including running several research projects related to the deadly agent anthrax.
“In the wake of the Coronavirus outbreak on Chinese soil, China’s now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology has signed the covert deal with Pakistan military’s Defense Science and Technology Organization (DESTO), to collaborate research in “emerging infectious diseases” and advance studies on the biological control of transmitted diseases,” the journalist alleged in his article about the alleged China-Pakistan nexus in carrying out secret research for contagious diseases.
“China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology had ‘lent all financial, material and scientific support for the project,” Klan quoted a source privy to the details of the covert deal.
Klan had claimed that China’s plan was to designate Pakistan a destination for hazardous bio chemical research while evading use of its own territory for such activities. Though one example was a proposal to test a Coronavirus vaccine, made by Chinese state-owned company Sinopharm, on Pakistani citizens, The China-Pakistan biological project had already undertaken experiments on the Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV), Klan claimed citing sources.
Klan’s report claimed that Pakistan had been provided with the reagents for Bacillus Thuringiensis by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the covert China-Pakistan project has conducted “successful soil sampling tests” to isolate Bacillus Thuringiensis (BT), which has a ‘striking similarity’ to Bacillus Anthracis – or anthrax bacteria.
The Wuhan lab was also providing extensive training on manipulation of pathogens and bio-informatics to Pakistani scientists to help Pakistan develop its own virus collection database, the Klaxon report had said.
Wuhan Institute of Virology accused of spreading the coronavirus pandemic
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been in the news because the coronavirus is believed to have been originated in Wuhan. As the pandemic had its origins in Wuhan, many claims have emerged that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was behind the creation of the coronavirus that is afflicting the entire world.
Earlier in April, the Fox News, in an exclusive report on the origins of the coronavirus, claimed that an intern working at Wuhan laboratory may have accidentally contracted the contagion and spread it to others. Later, US President Donald Trump echoed similar sentiments, saying he had a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus had its roots in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Also, the speculations over the involvement of Wuhan Institute of Virology in sparking off a global pandemic were raised further when Shi Zhengli, an expert on SARS-like coronaviruses claimed that the coronavirus bears stark resemblance with the frozen samples of bat virus that were sent to Wuhan Institute of Virology, collected from an abandoned bat cave in China’s Yunnan province in 2013.
