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Terror by Error? The COVID Chronicles
About this book
Noted science writer William Sargent delves into the murky, often intertwined worlds of medical research and biological warfare to determine if Covid-19 was caused by accidents similar to those that have occurred from 1617 to the present.
Sargent reveals that mistakes made in dual use medical research and biological weapons facilities led to tick borne diseases in the United States, smallpox, anthrax and other germ outbreaks in Russia.
He helps unearth the factors that caused Covid-19, closing with the hope that these conditions will be altered or permanently banned in the future.
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Yes, you can access Terror by Error? The COVID Chronicles by William Sargent in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Biology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Terror by Error?
The Covid Chronicles
William Sargent
Cover by Jill Buchanan
“Yes but while we are talking, scientists are are working in hidden secret laboratories trying to develop, as best they can, diseases which the other man can’t cure.”
~ Richard P. Feynman
The Galileo Symposium
Italy 1964
The Galileo Symposium
Italy 1964
Acknowledgements
Introduction The Diamond Princess - Yokohama, Japan
Chapter 1 The Death of a Nation, Patuxet
Chapter 2 Washington’s Gamble
Chapter 3 Four Scientists
Chapter 4 Black Measles - Bitterroot Mountains, Montana
Chapter 5 The Spanish Flu - Boston, Massachusetts
Chapter 6 Two Planes
Chapter 7 Black Ops
Chapter 8 The Test; Dugway Proving Ground - Tooele County, Utah
Chapter 9 Over Cardenas, Cuba
Chapter 10 The Research Paper
Chapter 11 Tightening the Noose; The Smallpox Eradication Program, 1958- 1978
Chapter 12 “To Inoculate Every Man, Woman and Child.”
Chapter 13 The Official Story - Olde Lyme, Connecticut
Chapter 14 The Swiss Agent
Chapter 15 Outbreak - Plum Island
Chapter 16 Sverdlovsk
Chapter 17 The Phone Call - Biopreparat
Chapter 18 Defection
Chapter 19 The MCZ - Cambridge, Massachusetts
Chapter 20 The Bomblet; Washington
Chapter 21 Eckard Wimmer; The Polio Maker
part ii
Covid 19 128
Chapter 22 The Chicago of China; Wuhan
Chapter 23 The SARS Epidemic
Chapter 24 The Tired Technician; A Faustian Tale- Wuhan, China
Chapter 25 Fangcang; The Chinese Solution
Chapter 26 The Importance of Being Human; Colombia, South Carolina
Chapter 27 The Reassessment
Chapter 28 Horseshoe Crabs and Covid-19; The Life You Save May be Your Own!
Chapter 29 Palm Sunday; Ipswich, Massachusetts
Chapter 30 The Pink Moon; Eagle Hill, Massachusetts
Chapter 31 Covid-19 - And the Evolution of Planetary Consciousness
Chapter 32 Three Days, Three Crises.
Chapter 33 No, We’re Not All in the Same Boat
Chapter 34 The Really Big Short
Chapter 35 Another Year Without a Summer?
Chapter 36 Mutations; Los Alamos National Laboratory
Chapter 37 “We’re the Wild West Out Here!”
Chapter 38 Contrails From an Ipswich Porch
Chapter 39 George Floyd
Chapter 40 Pandora’s Box
Chapter 41 Don’t Tread on Mother Nature
Chapter 42 The Strange Case for Optimism
Chapter 43 Covid-19; The Vaccine Trial
Chapter 44 Russian Roulette
Chapter 45 The Worst Case Scenario; Ipswich, Massachusetts
Postscript Three Arthropods
notes
Dedication
To Luna.
I hope you will live in a better world because of how we respond to Covid-19.
Acknowledgements
Many people over dozens of years have helped me understand the murky, intersecting worlds of medical research and biological warfare. Both are places where mistakes are made that sometimes lead to medical breakthroughs, sometimes to deadly pandemics.
When I was writing about the push to develop vaccines for troops entering Iraq, Tom Monath of Acambis introduced me to his world where grueling fieldwork led him to form a small start-up company that beat out much larger firms to win a hefty contract to develop a new vaccine for smallpox.
Ken Alibek told me about his journey from being an idealistic young medical student to being the head of Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s dual use facility that produced hundreds of tons of biological agents that were loaded onto missiles targeting for cities in the United States.
After defecting, Ken became a successful consultant and owner of a multi-million dollar biotech company in Virginia. The fact that US intelligence never knew the true nature of Biopreparat gave me pause about the origins of Covid-19 as well.
Sue little, the owner of the inestimable Newburyport bookstore Jabberwocky, and Don Paquin told me of their decades long bouts with tick-borne diseases. Carl Soderland who gave me insights about treating these controversial new illnesses.
I would particularly like to thank the late John Buttman from the Ike Williams agency who believed in this book from the beginning. I was especially looking forward to working with him when he was struck down by a heart attack in the early days of the pandemic.
I would also like to thank Becky Coburn who has now stewarded six of my manuscripts through the entire publication process, and my friend and inestimable editor Richard Lodge at the Newburyport Daily where many of these chapters were first published.
Finally I would like to thank the good people at the Quebec Labrador Foundation, The Sounds Conservancy, Andy Griffith, and Plum Island Outdoors for providing grants to help fund research for this book.
Introduction
The Diamond Princess - Yokohama, Japan
February 2020
Jerri Serratti-Goldman was elated to finally be going on a cruise through the Orient with her husband Carl. He had given her tickets for passage on the Diamond Princess as a Christmas present and they had departed on their dream vacation on January 17.
But two days before the end of the 16-day cruise the Captain announced that a passenger who had already departed from the ship had been diagnosed with a coronavirus so they would have to return to Yokohama and go into quarantine for 12 more days.
They had a sunny starboard cabin and could look through their portholes and see ambulances rushing passengers to the Yokohama Hospital. But a steady stream of crew members in masks and gloves brought them trays full of delicious food, so they decided to just make the best of it.
The Goldmans were fortunate. Carl had booked an expensive upper deck cabin so they could sit on their balcony and walk the deck three times a day.
Passengers in the lower decks had no windows and their cabins were so cramped they had to lie in their bunks or sit on a straight-backed chair breathing infectious, recycled air.
The U. S. State department finally rescued the couple, flying them out of Japan on a chartered plane, but two hours into the flight Carl awoke. “I had a high fever after napping for a little bit.”
He was flown on to Omaha with 12 other infected passengers to be quarantined in a bio containment unit where his only contact with the outside world were staff who could just wave at him through a thick window and doctors in Hazmat suits who gave him no medications but checked his vital signs and gave him Gatorade three times a day.
The new coronavirus had apparently emerged on December 1 2019. At first it looked like the novel virus, dubbed Covid-19, had originated in the Wuhan seafood market where people bought snakes and Pangolins that had been eating infected bats.
The disease had spread rapidly and by mid-February Wuhan was in strict lockdown and the Covid-19’s annual rate of infection was through the roof.
It was this annual rate of infection that drew me into investigating the infectious new pathogen because it was so similar to the infection rate of the tick borne diseases that had been ravaging the East Coast.
But there was a big difference between the two epidemics. Covid-19 had evolved a mutation so it could be spread from human to human, perhaps from the genome of one of its human victims, perhaps from the genome of one of its bat, snake or pangolin vectors. However tick borne diseases had never evolved the ability to be transmitted from human to human.
While I was doing research on the outbreak I came across a curious online comment that said that the virus had probably escaped from a Level 4 Bio Safety facility in Wuhan China and that it was the only such facility in China. Now, this was interesting. I had never heard of the facility and decided to investigate further.
It turned out that Israeli intelligence and several biological weapons e...
Table of contents
- Acknowledgements