It remains a mystery, the “phantom virus” we have discussed. Medical experts still can’t get their arms around it. It seems at once profoundly physical and ephemeral. It moves with such stealth that millions were infected before we noticed it — as many as twenty times the official U.S. number. It may well have been around six months or a year ago or before that. The point is that we don’t know. We are also still adding symptoms to this virus that causes more effects than perhaps any recognized in a pandemic — and often bizarre ones (loss of taste, blisters, disorientation, brain damage). It can cause just sniffles or affect most major organs. Some of this is simply because we have not yet built up immunity. But it can inflict permanent damage even to a person who is without symptoms. It also can spread from those with no sign of it — and not just through the standard cough or sneeze but rather by a person in proximity simply speaking and breathing. It moves with a speed epidemiologists say they have never seen before. We still are unsure how or to what extent it disseminates through contaminated surfaces. An infected person can test negative. Those who have it have on occasion said they felt there was something “evil” in them. Oh those spikes! It has a nearly interdimensional endowment. In short, it seems nearly like a cross between physical and spiritual — demons on a rampage (bringing to mind Catholic prophecies about the pit of hell unleashing its fury — and furies).
Is it real?
My twin sister in Connecticut knows five people who have died from it. Our son in Manhattan had it the first week of March. The woman he sits near at work got a severe case of it and spread it to her family. A close college buddy of mine was sick with flu-like symptoms for a week after being in contact with a friend of his who’d had it, and my friend then developed a large blood clot in his leg — another strange effect of this illness (though he also tested negative, thrice). We had a bizarre flu in late January of 2019 in our own family that remains totally unlike any previous illness. The fellow who used to be in charge of news for EWTN was on a ventilator. A Eucharistic minister from our parish went for a vacation to Germany and died days after leaving from “pneumonia” (though she seemed very healthy). This ain’t no flu. They don’t dig mass graves each year due to influenza. Can it be manipulated for geopolitical ends (including suppression of people in a new world order)? Yes. Can it be manipulated in politics? Yes. But is it real? Same answer. Yes. Thus the puzzlement.
It is amazing and confounding. Many wear masks — for very good reason. Many refuse to — rightly fearful of governmental control. An elderly fellow at church refuses to wear one on the way up to receive Communion in a devout way — while for all he or anyone knows, he is breathing it upon those he passes. In other cases, the restrictions seem overdone, an infringement on freedom. It is confounding at every turn. Why has the U.S. been singled out? Is it a coincidence that it strikes hardest at places like bars? If AIDS targeted homosexuals and drug users, this one is targeting where money is made and vanity is spawned. If you defy it with pride, it will find you. Is it population manipulation or a test of civil obedience (which the Church teaches)? Preachers who ignored local health dictates have succumbed to it. Fox News noted two days ago, “A man who organized a group to protest Maryland’s lockdown orders has fallen seriously ill after contracting the coronavirus. Tim Walters of ReOpen Maryland announced he was battling the disease last week on Facebook, the New York Post reported. ‘I thought I was actually having a stroke … turns out I had COVID,’ he said, according to the paper. He asked for prayers.” You got those prayers, Tim.
And the weirdness bespeaks not only a spiritual-biological hybrid — a demon on the rampage, a warning/chastisement — but of other matters that still glide under societal radar.
As we pointed out two months ago in a “special report,” there are aspects of this extraordinarily bizarre global situation that suggest a virus not born of natural mutations but perhaps synthesized in a lab.
Noted CBC in Canada last week: “Newly-released access-to-information documents reveal details about a shipment of deadly pathogens last year from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab to China — confirming for the first time who sent them, what exactly was shipped, and where it went. CBC News had already reported about the shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses but there’s now confirmation one of the scientists escorted from the lab in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation last July was responsible for exporting the pathogens to the Wuhan Institute of Virology four months earlier.”
While, if it bears relevance, that would indicate the virus is more recent, it is just one of many times viruses have been exchanged between Western countries — especially the U.S., where bat viruses specifically have been genetically altered, and where two Wuhan bat-virus workers trained — and China. Among other research has been what they call “gain-of-function”: manipulations of the most dangerous coronaviruses to make them more deadly. That’s done either to test cures and vaccines against what could theoretically occur in nature, or for bioweaponry.
Add to this a mysterious connection to HIV. Those claiming it could be a lab-enhanced virus have asserted that four sections of its RNA match the virus that causes AIDS. “At the beginning of the pandemic, the coronavirus looked to be another respiratory illness,” said The New York Times Sunday. “Now researchers have discovered yet another unpleasant surprise. In many patients hospitalized with the coronavirus, the immune system is threatened by a depletion of certain essential cells, suggesting eerie parallels with H.I.V.”
Are we, thus, fighting a weaponized pathogen fashioned with components of the AIDS pathogen?
This from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Startling, never-before-seen images show that the new coronavirus hijacks proteins in our cells to create monstrous tentacles that branch out and may transmit infection to neighboring cells.”
Creepy.
Symbolic.
A microbial octopus.
It is spooky. It does seem like hell has creaked open. Maybe it is better said that the doorway to the netherworld has been thrown open.
Of course — knowingly or unknowingly — the demons propagating it can be human.
-MHB
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