Coronavirus pandemic: why we can talk about the biological warfare

And this is one of the signs that gives out suspiciously high complexity, if not thoughtfulness, in the coronavirus, the scientist believes.

Andrey Zlobin, mathematician, candidate of technical sciences

Evidence suggests that the complex relationship between the United States and China could well lead, if not to direct sabotage, then to tragic negligence in handling dangerous biological technologies.

At the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the famous doctor Leonid Roshal called what was happening a rehearsal of biological warfare. There is no direct evidence today that COVID-19 is a biological weapon. It is impossible to assert a certain intent that initiated such a dangerous disease. However, attention is drawn to many indirect signs that characterize the current pandemic as a kind of equivalent of military technology.

First of all, it should be noted the selectivity of the coronavirus, which is fatal for older patients. Many older people already suffer from chronic illness and the cumulative effect of COVID-19 on older people is often fatal. Who will dispute that the power of a modern large state is determined by the intellectual level of the population, the degree of development of science and technology? Who can dispute that most scientists reach their peak of scientific qualifications in adulthood and old age? So it turns out - the coronavirus primarily mows experienced intellectuals. The damage that is done is monstrous. Is it acceptable that in the prime of his creative powers Academician Yevgeny Mikrin, the largest specialist in the field of space technologies, General Designer of RSC Energia, died from the coronavirus? Doesn't the hair stand on end from the fact that the coronavirus took the life of the previous president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician Vladimir Fortov? Did the covid take away a few of the lives of prominent cultural and art workers? It would be naive to believe that such heavy losses do not lead to a sharp weakening of the intellectual potential of the state.

There is an equally dangerous property of the coronavirus - to influence social and economic processes. Consequences such as lockdown, forced self-isolation, traffic collapse, restriction of personal communications slow down development and lead to huge losses in the economy. Production facilities are rising, established production ties are collapsing, businesses are being ruined, layoffs are multiplying, and tension in society is growing. It becomes much more difficult for the security services to work, since everyone, including criminals and terrorists, gets the right to wear masks. Doesn't all this look like the aftermath of hostilities? One could doubt this conclusion, but why do we see unprecedented measures to protect against coronavirus all over the world, right up to the closure of borders? It is quite obvious that COVID-19 carries with it a threat of almost a military level, and the term “antidote” that has flashed in recent years, in general, openly revives the terminology of civil defense.

The recently voiced opinion of the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician Alexander Sergeev, about the multitude of "unknown numerical characteristics in covid" leads to disturbing thoughts. Note that the President of the Academy of Sciences mentioned the problems of modeling coronavirus using a powerful supercomputer. It turns out that the insidiousness of the virus can compete even with computers. The same technique that has already learned to beat the world chess champion. Is the tiny covid virus really that smart and its current mathematical models are fundamentally wrong? Very likely, and this makes one think about biological weapons.

In the vast majority of cases, they try to describe COVID-19 using mathematical models such as SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Recovered). Here S is the number of people susceptible to the disease, I is the number of infected, R is the number of recovered. This is the simplest differential model of the 20s of the last century, which contains a small number of parameters. Over the past century, the SIR model has been modified many times, and many of its varieties have appeared with additional refinements. The bulk of scientific publications on modeling the coronavirus pandemic does not go beyond this approach. Such simple mathematical models do not require the use of record-breaking supercomputers. The insidious properties of covid and its destructive power should be described by much more complex and expensive mathematics, which really requires the most advanced computer technologies to solve. This is another sign of suspiciously high complexity, if not thoughtfulness, in the coronavirus.

It is easy to find information on the leading countries with the largest number of powerful supercomputers on the Internet. These are, first of all, China and the USA, and the former is ahead of the USA in this indicator. Coincidentally, an outbreak of coronavirus was first recorded in Wuhan, China, where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is located. China was the first to take control of the spread of infection in its country. Not much information - how many Chinese translators are there? Experimental scientists sometimes say "one coincidence is an accident, two coincidences are an unknown pattern, and three coincidences are already a law." The facts show that the complicated relationship between the United States and China could well have led, if not to direct sabotage, then to tragic negligence in handling the most dangerous biological technologies. Unique technologies that require many powerful supercomputers, expensive mathematics, general high level of intelligence and technological development.

You can doubt as much as you like about the achievements of modern biological science, but we must not forget the emergence of a new direction - bioinformatics. This is a path that leads to a fundamentally new level of understanding of the processes in living organisms and opens up opportunities for their programming. In 2010 and 2014, the author made reports at international conferences on bioorganic chemistry, biotechnology and bionanotechnology. The abstracts were published in a special issue of the prestigious journal Acta Naturae, covering the life sciences and biotechnology. In 2013, there was an expanded publication in the Archive of Preprints of the Los Alamos National Laboratory of the USA arXiv.org. Today, it has been mathematically rigorously proven that atoms have special metric properties that can be used in cybernetic pattern recognition algorithms. As a specialist who graduated from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, the author understands the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems at the level of biological nanotechnology. All that is needed is the enormous power of supercomputer technology. It seems quite reasonable that the United States and China have reached a technological level that could lead to the "training" of a particular virus based on artificial intelligence algorithms, for example, neural networks.

I would like to cool the ardor of optimists who believe that you can always quickly "catch up and overtake". Indeed, both the Soviet atomic bomb and the space flight of Yuri Gagarin were implemented quite quickly, and for the most part were calculated on slide rule. Alas, looking at what is called the genome, it becomes clear that there is nothing to do with a slide rule. With the technologies of yesterday, it will no longer be possible to outplay rivals - the end result is determined only by fabulous money. A lot of very expensive brains, very expensive laboratories, very expensive supercomputers, very expensive mathematical models. A new American supercomputer, the Frontier, has already been announced with a performance of 1.5 quintillion (1,500,000,000,000,000,000) operations per second. To make it clear, such a computer is capable of counting all the stars around us ten million times in one second. One can imagine what opportunities such computing power opens up for biology and virology. In this sense, the threat of biological warfare should not be underestimated and the words of Leonid Roshal should be taken seriously.