Virtual Book Launch for On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation

Please join me for the virtual launch of my new book, On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation. Dan Wells, founder of Biblioasis, my publisher, has asked the wonderful novelist, non fiction author, and former Harrowsmith Editor, Wayne Grady to interview me. While the book has garnered interest from the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star, there is a lot to discuss that newspaper articles and national news reports cannot convey which might be of interest to anyone getting ready to cast a vote in the federal election. The format permits us to take questions from any who have them.

The interview will be live-streamed starting at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, September 15, 2021. You can view the live stream and participate on Facebook or YouTube.

Hope to see you there.

Elaine

My new book: On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation

On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation is the title of my new book. It is the product of more than a year's hard digging into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It will be out by the end of August in Canada, the first week in September in the US. 

It is without doubt the hardest book I've ever written. Doing an investigation during a pandemic required me to reinvent the tactics I used when I started in journalism in the early 1970s. My first job for Maclean's Magazine was to research a story on the planned Montreal Olympics for a writer who had strong opinions about why it shouldn't go forward, but no facts to back them up. To do that project, I rarely left the periodical section of the University of Toronto's Robarts Library because what I found there about past Olympics --all had involved financial boondoggles-- was great support for the writer's argument. ("You found this in the library? In the newspapers? In magazines? Really?") To do this one, I rarely left the house, working instead on two computers and a smart phone which provided instantaneous access to a tsunami of information. In the beginning, when we were locked down, no one was allowed to leave their home for any reason other than to buy food (and toilet paper) or for a medical emergency. Even if I'd ignored those rules, it wouldn't have got me anywhere. Most of the researchers I wanted to interview don't live in Canada and weren't in their labs anyway.  The borders were shut. Most government officials were working from home. Parliament was closed. So I was forced to develop my own imperfect version of the method of inquiry once wielded like a broadsword by the legendary US journalist I.F. Stone. His most important scoops came from careful reading of public documents and deft use of the Freedom of Information Act.   

I read everything I could find in learned journals, in pre-print literature and on academics' blogs about the nature of SARS-CoV-2, its relationship to other coronaviruses, its chemistry, its evolutionary history, the very unusual structure of its genome and its near perfect adaptation to human beings from the very start of the pandemic. I scoured the worldwide daily press, dived down many internet rabbit holes, made too many access to information applications. Most knowledgeable researchers, to my surprise, didn't answer my emails. That was a first: usually scientists want to discuss their work with journalists. It helps them climb the tenure ladder to get their ideas circulating in the broader community. More astonishing was the lengths to which civil servants went to protect themselves and their political masters from embarrassment by means of improper redactions and outright refusals to comply with the access to information law. As I figured out who I had to talk to, if they responded (a few did) I  interviewed them by means of email and telephone. But it was mainly through their published works that I came to know then. What I learned about the way globalized virological science has been practiced over the past twenty years surprised and enraged me. Certain names kept coming up: Shi Zhengli, Linfa Wang, Peter Daszak, Ralph S. Baric, Kristian Andersen, Zhihong Hu, Xianguo Qiu, Keding Cheng, Chen Wei, E.C. Holmes, George Gao. 

The book is both a detection narrative and an exposition of the political and scientific context for the worst public health disaster since the great flu epidemic of 1918/19. It points fingers. It names names. It describes the way in which the government of China, from the very beginning, withheld vital information and promoted false-by-omission scientific narratives in order to deflect blame even as it permitted the virus to spread. China's relentless PR campaign began at the end of December, 2019 even as the first mention of a nasty pneumonia circulating in Wuhan found its way to social media sites and from there to the West. China was helped in its efforts by the WHO, whose job is to protect the world from such disasters, and even more shockingly by some of the world's best scientific journals, our leading coronavirus experts and the US institutions which fund their work. All were more anxious to protect their interests than to pursue the truth. The book describes in detail how China used the globalization of biological science as cover for dual-use research that could not be done at home, reaching into the most secure laboratory in Canada for the study of the most dangerous pathogens  (Ebola, Marburg, Nipah). China's top military/civilian scientists (there is no boundary between them) used it as if it were their very own lab for years. 

More than 4 million people are known to have died from SARS-CoV-2 since December, 2019. That number is at least twice as high if suspected, but not certified, COVID deaths in India are factored in. It will continue to grow as the virus wends its way throughout the mostly un-vaccinated developing world, mutating as it goes, stumbling on ever more clever means to infect humans and the susceptible animals that live near us. These deaths are not and will not be the result of an unavoidable accident of nature: they are and will be the product of the very best human minds.

As the 4th wave begins, it's time to hold some of those humans to account.

Stay tuned.

On Power, and Chinese Diplomacy

I prefer information that professional journalists have worked hard to deliver. I read newspapers. I listen to the radio, and I watch at least two different television networks newscasts every night.

That's why I saw and heard various versions of China's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Wang Yi, verbally ripping skin off Amanda Connolly, a journalist for iPolitics, at a press conference in Ottawa.

Wang Yi was there for talks with the Prime Minister and with Global Affairs Minister Stephane Dion about a free trade deal between Canada and China.You might well ask why Canada would pursue such an agreement when energy prices are at rock bottom, and so many Canadian manufacturing jobs have been taken by China where wages are much lower and regulations much easier to ignore. Do we really yearn for more of same? One answer, the public answer, is that both Europe and US are entering protectionist phases in their politics, and Canada, a trading nation, must find all alternative markets. A more powerful reason may be that Power Corporation, the Quebec based financial services company with global reach (yet intimate relationships with leaders of Canada's political class), has large investments in China and owes favors.

Ms. Connolly, the pool reporter chosen to put the one question she and her colleagues were permitted, dared to ask the Minister about human rights abuses in China, including the fate of a Canadian missionary, Kevin Garratt, indicted there as a Canadian spy and currently languishing in a gulag. Garratt, who ran a Christian mission/restaurant on the China side of the border with North Korea, was arrested along with his wife after the government of Canada complained publicly about China's hackers rummaging through the National Research Council's supposedly protected files. After months of interrogation, Garratt's wife was let go. Not Garratt.

Minister Wang's response was a naked display of power, apparently the new normal in China's diplomacy. Instead of letting Minister Dion answer the journalist's question, the Foreign Minister intervened and hammered out that China is the second largest economy in the world, has lifted six hundred million people from poverty in the last few decades, has a constitution that protects human rights, could not have done all this without due regard to human rights and, therefore, the journalist's question was a display of ignorance and arrogance and "totally unacceptable." Was it the part of the question that touched on those publishers kidnapped off the streets in Hong Kong so they couldn't publish on Wang's boss, Xi's, dalliances that got his goat? I don't think anything got his goat. I think it was a set up.

The photo in my morning paper reinforced my reading of the social meaning of the whole business -- Minister Wang was acting as proxy for his country's authority. Alpha males, especially those who acquire power in business or politics, work hard at being sleek. (Well okay, Donald Trump is the exception that proves the rule.) Mr. Wang appears to have spent hours and hours getting fitted for his very expensive suit, shirt, tie, his appearance polished further by a personal hair stylist. Does his State pay for this?  He looks like a man who enjoys wealth and has no fear of anyone asking where it came from. (One wonders: do members of his family own nice homes in Vancouver?)

The contrast between him and Stephane Dion was marked. While not rumpled, Dion was certainly not sleek. Dion sometimes carries a backpack to work, which is what you would expect of an academic with not the slightest interest in wealth and a dubious understanding of how to demonstrate power. At the press conference, Dion stood passively, his hands folded, as Minister Wang swung his arm wide, physically dominating the podium, demonstrating China's dominant status for the world to see.

Even the titles of their two departments are weirdly telling-- they are lies that speak to truths. You would think, given the way China has been hacking everybody's secrets, and building islands in the South China Sea for its military jets to land on, claiming same as China's traditional territory, that China would call its outreach department something with more punch than Foreign Affairs. You'd think Canada, with hardly any military power left to its name, would find a more modest moniker for Stephane Dion than Minister of Global Affairs.

Human political power does require displays of bluster, bullying, and threats in order to be effective, but it is also shaped by the particulars of a nation's political culture, whether power runs from the bottom up, or from the top down, or a mix of both.  Political power in Canada is always contested by competing interests even when a Prime Minister wins a big majority. Whoever is wise enough to make it to the top of the political greasy pole knows that great efforts must be exerted to make common cause with competitors in order to stay aloft. Those on top in Canada are well advised to make big shows of humility, because tomorrow their power might be--will be--gone. China, by contrast, is run by an authoritarian regime whose power has been acquired at the point of a gun. Any power wielded by those down below is only by the grace of those at the very top. When those on the bottom grow restless with their lack of status, humility shown by the leader can be very, very dangerous, an invitation to shake the throne. As it happens, the bottom is restless in China, because its economy has slowed, and there are far too many low status males without partners (like India, the aborted babies of China tend to be female). The men on the bottom are unhappy about future prospects.

For these reasons, the Chinese leadership must constantly appear strong, and there is no safer weakling for China to measure itself against than a foreigner with no significant navy, not much of an air force, and no history of attacking others--except native people-- without cause. Any nation looking for favors from China, such as Canada, even one which might be useful by offering back door entry to the US market, must cuddle close and be willing to bend like a pretzel.

That the Trudeau government has named its outreach department Global Affairs is a flat out admission that Canada's power in the world is at its nadir and common cause with just about everybody is therefore the order of the day. The Trudeau government should be applauded for recognizing this country's peril. I wouldn't be surprised if the very clever Canadian officials who work in the department of Global Affairs goaded Ms. Connolly and her colleagues into asking that question. This gave Wang a moment he clearly had prepared for.

Or should I say hoped for.
 
It must have played very well on Chinese newscasts.