SYSTEM OF A DOWN's JOHN DOLMAYAN Floats Conspiracy Theories About The Origin Of The New Coronavirus: 'I Have A Big Imagination'

SYSTEM OF A DOWN drummer John Dolmayan has floated a couple of conspiracy theories about the origins of the novel coronavirus, including the suggestion that the COVID-19 virus was created in a laboratory.

There has been no shortage of conspiracy theories flying around about the how the coronavirus was unleashed, such as that the pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party to politically damage President Donald Trump or that it's a secret bioweapon unleashed on the U.S. by China.

Dolmayan offered his thoughts on the virus's source during a brand new interview with the "Metal Injection Livecast".

Speaking about the coronavirus's impact on the U.S. economy and the U.S. population as a whole, John said (hear audio below): "Honestly, I think there's a lot of positives that can come out of this. But at the end of the day, what I'm really concerned with is that people are financially gonna be hit very hard. I don't wanna see high unemployment levels. I have a business that I run. We have 15 empoyees, and I'm doing the best I can to keep everybody employed. That's the only thing you're really concerned with during times like this.

"I guess I'm not quite as afraid as other people are about the virus itself," he continued. "I feel like human beings are made to combat viruses. We have systems in place in our bodies to combat viruses.

"It there's one positive thing, to powers that be, it got rid of a lot of people that were protesting really fast. So, I don't know. I question stuff, and I have my own theories on things, and people think I'm an idiot sometimes for it. But I also have a big imagination."

When asked to clarify which protesters he was referring to, Dolmayan said: "Well, there were protesters in Hong Kong, there were protesters in France, there were protesters in Italy, Lebanon, Chile — there were protests happening worldwide, people demanding change from their governments, and it's just kind of convenient that there's a coronavirus and all those protests go away.

"I write for a hobby, and I actually started writing my own comic book that's gonna come out in a couple of months or so, whenever this thing clears up, so I do have an active imagination and I see depths in things and reasons within reasons and stuff like that," he explained. "Maybe I'm nuts or maybe my philosophies have a ring of truth to them, but I just think that there's interesting coincidences and convenient things that happen to motivate things. World War I started on an assassination attempt. Was that person assassinated by the people that wanted the war? There's just things that happened in history that are interesting that are hard to explain.

"What did these viruses pop out of? It's not bats and shit like that," he said. "People in China have been eating that way for thousands of years."

Elaborating on his suggestion that the Chinese government has embarked on a campaign to deflect its responsibility and disguise its accountability for the outbreak, John said: "There's nothing China's gonna do in the first few weeks to stop people from buying and consuming Chinese product. This is my theory — they would prefer the entire world economy being bad than just the Chinese economy. Because what happens if we can't get our goods from China because there's a shutdown in China? Then we're gonna get it from other places — their competitors. And once you develop supply chains from other places, then people get used to working with other people, they're not necessarily gonna wanna go back and work with China afterwards.

"There's a whole political, global, financial thing you have to understand," he added. "They don't care about a couple of million people dying. And I'm not just talking about China; I'm talking about governments in general. Because they have to look at it kind of like an ant colony. It's more important for the ant colony to survive than members of the ant colony, including the queen. It's understandable, although it's not fun to think about things in those terms."

A recent report pubished by Nature Medicine said that the coronavirus pandemic circling the globe was caused by a natural virus, not one made in a lab. An investigation by researchers from the United States, Britain and Australia also found the virus might have made the jump from animal to humans long before the first detection in the central China city of Wuhan.

Millions of Americans are facing stay-at-home orders as the coronavirus continues to tear its way through the U.S.

More than one million coronavirus cases have been reported worldwide and more than 52,000 deaths so far, putting public health systems and emergency services under immense pressure.

U.S. officials have repeatedly urged Americans to heed what federal, state and local officials are asking of them in order to curtail the spread and dampen the impact of the virus on the population.