Maria Laura Avignolo
04/25/2020 - 15:20
- Clarín.com
- World
No one can forget former French President Jacques Chirac's passion for the eastern world, his knowledge of China and Japan, and the mutual admiration between Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin and Beijing. From this voluntarist fatal attraction, Wuhan P4 was born, a laboratory suitable for bacteriological warfare if there were bad intentions. But that France exported so that China could fight its repeated epidemics with French scientists.
Those modern facilities, on mountains and on the edge of a highway in Wuhan, where many of the factories that supply auto parts to the French automobile industry from China are located, are today at the heart of a dispute over the origin of the coronavirus that is moving the world.
Social networks insist that COVID-19 escaped from this virology laboratory, the acronym of which refers to "class 4 pathogens", the most dangerous microorganisms of a virus. Netizens around the world spread the rumor across the globe and sought to disprove the Chinese theory that it was linked to bats from a dirty wild animal market in that city in China's Hubei province.
To this theory of the plot was added the Nobel Prize and discoverer of AIDS, the French professor Luc Montaigner, who believes it to be a human production, the work of a molecular biologist, who linked SARS-COV-2 with the AIDS virus to generate this viral cocktail, which is decimating the planet and its inhabitants and for which there is no treatment.
More specifically, the European and North American secret services believe that it could be "an accident", "an accidental infection of an employee". But the truth is that until now China has prevented any investigation in the field , the arrival of WHO specialists or foreign scientists to Whuhan.
A meat stall at a market in Wuhan, China. The main hypothesis is that Covid-19 originated from a market where live animals were sold in that city. / AFP
France, Britain and the United States argue that China must answer “difficult questions” post virus. For French President Emmanuel Macron, "things have happened that we have no knowledge of." A discomfort for France. Because that P4 laboratory, of high biological security destined to the study of pathogenic viruses so that there is no vaccine or treatment, was exported by the French government and started when Macron was president.
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Watch the specialWhen the decision was made, in France it created enormous tensions between the Chirac government and its scientists, who always considered that a laboratory capable of bacteriological warfare and without control was being delivered to China .
In 2004 Jacques Chirac and then Chinese President Hu Jintao partnered "to fight emerging infectious diseases." In this roadmap they established the transfer of a P4 laboratory, which was signed by Chancellor Michel Barnier and today a European negotiator for Brexit.
In January 2004, then French President Jacques Chirac received his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao at the Elysee Palace. / EFE
The story goes that then-Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin, a public relations and marketing man, had gone to meet with Dr. Chen Zhu, forming the St Louis hospital in Paris and close to former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Just a year before export, China had been a victim of the SARS epidemic, the severe respiratory syndrome.
Chirac, a humanist, believed that the Chinese had to be "helped" to work on the new virus. ”But above all, allowing them to work in good conditions, preventing them from acting alone, without adequate material and without the essential knowledge for this type of manipulation. Prevent them from isolating themselves, ”according to one of the officials who was close to the project.
A file photo of the Wuhan P4 Laboratory in China's Hubei Province./AFP
But P4 divided the French government and the scientific community . Chirac, Raffarin, physician and chancellor Bernard Kourchner, plus pharmaceutical industrialist Alainb Mërieux, who chaired the program committee with doctor Chen Zhu, agreed. But the scientific community was strongly opposed by the secret services, the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Ministry. They believed that the result could be "a biological arsenal" like that of Iraq.
Most politicians recalled that, unlike nuclear or chemical sites, there was no international control over this kind of sensitive health center. Scientists reminded them that China had had "an absolute lack of transparency" when Raffarin delivered the P3 mobile lab, in the midst of a previous epidemic. The scientists pointed out "the learning difficulties" of the Chinese, "their opacity", their resistance to bilateral cooperation, their scientific obscurantism.
"P4 is a bacteriological atomic bomb," emphasized a scientist, so that politicians understood what they were sending. Safety procedures, diving suits, decontamination bags must be strictly respected.
The policy on the precautions of science won. E l laboratory was completed in January 2015 and launched in January 2018 , when President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Beijing. The French had sinned innocent when China was interested in appropriating its technology. Breaches began. The 50 French researchers who were to work at Wuhan P4 for 5 years were never. Alain Merieux, in charge of the bilateral commission with the Chinese, resigned due to non-compliance.
The Chinese were left in charge of the project, alone, without French control. The Washington Post newspaper announced two weeks ago that in January 2018, members of the American embassy in Beijing had alerted that there were insufficient security measures at P4. A number of researchers sold the experimental animals in the Wuhan market. Others threw laboratory tests in the pipes without treatment for biological waste.
All this arises in the context of a violent trade war being waged between China and the United States, which accuse each other of the COVID 19 planetary earthquake. A propaganda war follows the virus, which includes the expulsion of Chinese and North American journalists respectively .
The result is that, in the middle, the lack of sanitary autonomy of the West vis-à-vis China is exposed. 90 percent of antibiotics are made in China, which supplies 80 percent of raw materials for all medicines in the world. The next victim of the coronavirus will be globalization and the relocations of western companies in China to end this dependency.
Paris, correspondent