To the Editors,
A little over 100 years ago, there was a world pandemic called “Spanish Flu”. It was not called that because of its origin, but because it was first identified there. The Spanish called it, and still do, “French Flu”, referring to its journey over the Pyrenees. Because of the war going on, the deaths on both sides of the lines, although much higher in the West, were attributed to dysentery and cholera, which were prevalent in the trenches, in order to hide its existence from those fighting. It was only much later that it was traced back to army training camps in Kansas. The isolated H1N1 virus and its variations have been responsible for several different outbreaks, including SARS, Swine Flu, COVID-19, and the seasonal flu, all of which have similar symptoms.
COVID-19 has a similar history; first identified in a Wuhan market, Washington pounced on the propaganda football, and pushed the idea that it was an escaped virus from a biological lab in Wuhan. The odd thing, however, is that there were four strains originally identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) from swabs taken from victims. There was a strain in China; a different one in Iran; a different one in Malaysia and Singapore; and a different one identified in Japan, Hawaii, and on the cruise ships that travelled up and down the Eastern coast of Asia to Australia. If the virus had a single source in the short time involved, all of the cases should have been the same strain; it took more than a year for science to detect any “variations”.
For Washington to drive home the idea that the virus originated in Wuhan, while political, is quickly determined as racist in the eyes of those wanting to point fingers. But the statement can be construed as racist because there is no evidence that it is true, other than the loud voices of those in Washington and their followers, and people are being blamed simply because they are Chinese.
As for Dr. Fauci not “raising Hell” in 2017, don’t forget that the “powers that be” when Dr. Fauci predicted the pandemic were the same bodies that denied its existence for more than a year after its identification.
Re. the writer’s final comment, that the US election (2020?) was “fixed”, I’m going to assume that he is old enough to remember the election of 2000, when as many as 600,000 voters were “disqualified” in Florida, with that state finally going to the Republicans and George W. Bush being elected. No explanation was ever given as to who decided that they be disqualified, or the reason, but the Democrats claimed that they were mostly Democrat voters (how they knew that is anybody’s guess!).
But you can go back to 1877 for the first claim that an election was “stolen”, when the two rival parties each claimed victory by sending different vote counts from the southern states, and Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal with the Election Committee, which had a Republican majority, to win the election by one Electoral College vote.
The US electoral system has always had problems, but succeeding administrations don’t fix the problems because they can be used for their own benefit. It’s hard to “fix” a US election with the numbers involved, but the system can be manipulated in one direction or another, so it remains, because each party thinks itself better at using the system than the other.
Bruce Burton,
Canfield
