There are agendas at play beyond the usual one of enriching pharmaceutical companies. Tell me what you make of this:
I take it as established that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan. Nobody believes the natural origin theory anymore. Nicholas Wade broke the story of the early cover-up over a year ago. In my layman's understanding, there is evidence that the DNA coding for the "spike" protein that the virus uses to dock with a cell shows evidence of gene-splicing.
To what purpose? Benevolent or malevolent? Simply put, was it part of a biological weapons program, or some misguided public health project?
Here is the freaky part. It turns out that your likelihood of dying of COVID depends upon whether or not you inherited a fragment of Neanderthal DNA on your third chromosome. If you have that DNA, you are 2-3 times more likely to die of COVID than otherwise.
Where is that Neaderthal DNA found? South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, as well as offshoot European populations in the Americas. Where is it absent? Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and offshoot East Asian populations (Native Americans).
We can divide humanity into three broad groups based on their inheritance from two early-human variants, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. West Eurasians and South Asians have traces of Neanderthal DNA but no Denisovan DNA. East Eurasians (including Native Americans) have both Neanderthal and Denisvan DNA, but do not carry that 3rd chromosome trait that confers vulnerability to COVID. Sub-Saharan Africans have neither Neaderthal nor Denisovan DNA and also lack the vulnerable trait.
There is a map in the link from Nature below that shows the prevalence of these genotypes worldwide. I tried to post it directly but could not.
Suppose you were a nefarious totalitarian regime on the east end of the Eurasian land mass, hoping to cause trouble. Why not engineer and then release a highly-transmissible virus that will cause illness but few deaths in your own population, while exacting a much greater toll in lives and chaos in other regions of the world?
If I'm right, I suspect COVID-19 was a test of the launch vehicle. The warhead will be on the next one.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3