1250 words

Project Coast was a secret biological/chemical weapons program developed by the apartheid government in South Africa started by a cardiologist named Wouter Basson. One of the many things they attempted was to develop a bio-chemical weapon that targets blacks and only blacks.

I used to listen to the Alex Jones show in the beginning of the decade and in one of his rants, he brought up Project Coast and how they attempted to develop a weapon to only target blacks. So I looked into it, and there is some truth to it.

For instance, The Washington Times writes in their article Biotoxins Fall Into Private Hands:

More sinister were the attempts — ordered by Basson — to use science against the country’s black majority population. Daan Goosen, former director of Project Coast’s biological research division, said he was ordered by Basson to develop ways to suppress population growth among blacks, perhaps by secretly applying contraceptives to drinking water. Basson also urged scientists to search for a “black bomb,” a biological weapon that would select targets based on skin color, he said. “Basson was very interested. He said ‘If you can do this, it would be very good,'” Goosen recalled. “But nothing came of it.”

They created novel ways to disperse the toxins: using letters and cigarettes to transmit anthrax to black communities (something those old enough to be alive during 911 know of), lacing sugar cubes with salmonella, lacing beer and peppermint candy with poison.

Project Coast was, at its heart, a eugenics program (Singh, 2008). Singh (2008: 9) writes, for example that “Project Coast also speaks for the need for those involved in scientific research and practice to be sensitized to appreciate the social circumstances and particular factors that precipitate a loss of moral perspective on one’s actions.”

Jackson (2015) states that another objective of the Project was to develop anti-fertility drugs and attempt to distribute them into the black population in South Africa to decrease birth rates. They also attempted to create vaccines to make black women sterile to decrease the black population in South Africa in a few generations—along with attempting to create weapons to only target blacks.

The head of the weapons program, Wouter Basson, is even thought to have developed HIV with help from the CIA to cull the black population (Nattrass, 2012). There are many conspiracy theories that involve HIV and its creation to cull black populations, though they are pretty farfetched. In any case, though, since they were attempting to develop new kinds of bioweapons to target certain populations, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that there is a kernel of truth to the story.

So now we come to today. So Kyle Bass said that the Chinese already have access to all of our genomes, through companies like Steve Hsu’s BGI, stating that “there’s a Chinese company called BGI that does the overwhelming majority of all the sequencing of U.S. genes. … China had the genomic sequence of every single person that’s been gene types in the U.S., and they’re developing bio weapons that only affect Caucasians.”

I have no way to verify these claims (they’re probably bullshit), but with what went on in the 80s and 90s in South Africa with Project Coast, I don’t believe it’s outside of the realm of plausibility. Though Caucasians are a broad grouping.

It’d be like if someone attempted to develop a bioweapon that only targets Ashkenazi Jews. They could let’s say, attempt to make a bioweapon to target those with Tay Sach’s disease. It’s, majorly, a Jewish disease, though it’s also prevalent in other populations, like French Canadians. It’d be like if someone attempted to develop a bioweapon that only targets those with the sickle cell trait (SCT). Certain African ethnies are more like to carry the trait, but it’s also prevalent in southern Europe and Northern Africa since the trait is prevalent in areas with many mosquitoes.

With Chinese scientists like He Jiankui CRISPR-ing two Chinese twins back in 2018 to attempt to edit their genome to make them less susceptible to HIV, I can see a scientist in China attempt to do something like this. In our increasingly technological world with all of these new tools we develop, I would be surprised if there was nothing strange like this going on.

Some claim that “China will always be bad at bioethics“:

Even when ethics boards exist, conflicts of interest are rife. While the Ministry of Health’s ethics guidelines state that ethical reviews are “based upon the principles of ethics accepted by the international community,” they lack enforcement mechanisms and provide few instructions for investigators. As a result, the ethics review process is often reduced to a formality, “a rubber stamp” in Hu’s words. The lax ethical environment has led many to consider China the “Wild East” in biomedical research. Widely criticized and rejected by Western institutions, the Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero found a home for his radical quest to perform the first human head transplant in the northern Chinese city of Harbin. Canavero’s Chinese partner, Ren Xiaoping, although specifying that human trials were a long way off, justified the controversial experiment on technological grounds, “I am a scientist, not an ethical expert.” As the Chinese government props up the pseudoscience of traditional Chinese medicine as a valid “Eastern” alternative to anatomy-based “Western” medicine, the utterly unscientific approach makes the establishment of biomedical regulations and their enforcement even more difficult.

Chinese ethicists, though, did respond to the charge of a ‘Wild East’, writing:

Some commentators consider Dr. He’s wrongdoings as evidence of a “Wild East” in scientific ethics or bioethics. This conclusion is not based on facts but on stereotypes and is not the whole story. In the era of globalization, rule-breaking is not limited to the East. Several cases of rule-breaking in research involved both the East and the West.

Henning (2006) notes that “bioethical issues in China are well covered by various national guidelines and regulations, which are clearly defined and adhere to internationally recognized standards. However, the implementation of these rules remains difficult, because they provide only limited detailed instructions for investigators.” With a large country like China, of course, it will be hard to implement guidelines on a wide-scale.

Gene-edited humans were going to come sooner or later, but the way that Jiankui went about it was all wrong. Jiankjui raised funds, dodged supervision and organized researchers in order to carry out the gene-editing on the Chinese twins. “Mad scientists” are, no doubt, in many places in many countries. “… the Chinese state is not fundamentally interested in fostering a culture of respect for human dignity. Thus, observing bioethical norms run second.”

Countries attempting to develop bioweapons to target specific groups of people have already been attempted recently, so I wouldn’t doubt that someone, somewhere, is attempting something along these lines. Maybe it is happening in China, a ‘Wild East’ of low regulations and oversight. There is a bioethical divide when it comes to East and West, which I would chalk up to differences in collectivism vs individualism (which some have claimed to be ‘genetic’ in nature; Kiaris, 2012). Since the West is more individualistic, they would care about individual embryos which eventually become a person; since the East is more collectivist, whatever is better for the group (that is, whatever can eventually make the group ‘better’) will override the individual and so, tinkering with individual genomes would be seen as less of an ethical charge to them.