For years now, we have heard that there is a growing threat of pandemics. It’s like a civic doctrine that everybody knows.
The entire conference theme of the World Economic Forum (WEF) this year was about “Disease X,” which everyone somehow expects. The idea here is that we should all live in fear and be consumed with unrelenting paranoia about infection because the next big wave is likely around the corner.
Bill Gates has been preaching this doctrine for many years. It’s the basis of a $1 trillion-plus industry all over the world and is engaging every important global institution.
The next pandemic is on its way, they say, and the government and large pharmaceutical companies are going to save us.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns, I watched several TED talks by Mr. Gates, who makes the claim that there will be growing pandemics. He announces it like it is gospel and incontrovertible. Nowhere does he actually explain his evidence. He just reasserts constantly that our travels, mixing, hyper-industrializing, and generalized global chaos are surely going to unleash something awful from an angry Mother Nature.
Incidentally, in the course of watching these videos, it also became obvious to me that Mr. Gates knows absolutely nothing about viruses and how they work, much less anything about epidemiology. He has very obviously never read a dummy’s guidebook much less a first-year medical text. Everything that he thinks he knows comes from his experience with computer viruses, if you can believe it. To him, a vaccine operates like Norton Antivirus.
No exaggeration.
In any case, what about this claim that pandemics are increasing and bound to get worse? A team of researchers have dared ask the unthinkable question: How do we even know this? They are associated with the University of Leeds in the UK and assisted by the Brownstone Institute. They call themselves REPPARE and their focus is on hard-core data to check the claims of the pandemic planning industry.
The one exception is Ebola, but even here, it “is a localized disease and normally rapidly contained.”
What about COVID-19? The usual claim is that this confirmed Mr. Gates’s worries. And yet, according to the Brownstone Institute:
“COVID-19 has of course intervened—the first outbreak since 1969 to result in greater mortality than seasonal influenza does each year. This mortality has occurred predominantly in the sick elderly, at a median age above 75 years in higher-mortality high-income countries, and in people with significant comorbidities, a contrast to the predominantly childhood deaths from malaria and young to middle-aged adults who die from tuberculosis. Excess mortality rose over baseline but separating out COVID-19 mortality from mortality resulting from the ‘lockdown’ measures, reducing disease screening and management in high-income countries and promoting poverty-related diseases in low-income countries, makes actual burden estimates difficult.”
That’s it exactly. In actual fact, even at this late date, we do not know the full mortality burden of COVID-19 the disease versus COVID-19 the controls. The authors do not point this out, but our times have a greater number of people than ever living to 75 and beyond, which would have been unthinkable in ages past. And so the vulnerable population was larger than ever. That said, once you throw in the uncertainty of PCR testing and the financial incentive to misclassify deaths, a fog begins to fall on the whole experience.
All that said, there’s no question that the experience seems to compare to a severe flu year, but the demographics of death hit mainly people at the point of the average lifespan—which is tragic but not impactful for the population as a whole. And yet the lockdowns hit everyone and for no apparent reason. It appears that the elites in charge had full expectations of a disastrous population-wide pandemic that never materialized. They have yet to admit that, however.
In any case, as it turns out, pandemics, for many decades, have been reducing in severity and prevalence, as our authors show. This is a rather inconvenient reality for the pandemic planning industry.
Why have pandemics become less rather than more of a problem? The reasons are 1) more robust immune systems from broad exposure, 2) better sanitation, and 3) better hygiene. These are roughly associated with the rise of global material prosperity, which makes life better overall. The pandemic planning industry has not been the decisive reason here. Instead, it is due to the above factors.
This one paper pretty well undermines the whole of these global efforts to prepare for something awful. Meanwhile, we are widely neglecting the actual problem of chronic disease, which is to say heart disease associated with obesity and substance abuse. The human population, in general, is not healthy, but this is not because of random appearances of viruses that vex us but rather because of our own choices and behaviors.
Thinking about things this way truly is a game-changing shift. It means that there is very little that pharmaceutical companies can do to repair the situation. We know that the most recent occasion when they tried—over the problem of COVID-19—was an enormous failure. The vaccine could not provide sterilizing immunity for this fast-mutating virus with an animal reservoir. It was always destined to infect most of the planet, and the overwhelming number of people infected did not experience medically significant downsides.
If you have read this far, the following question has already occurred to you. Let’s say that this is true of viruses of natural origin, but what about viruses made in a lab through gain-of-function research and lab leaks? If these mad scientists keep doing these creepy biowarfare experiments in cooperation with totalitarian governments such as the Chinese Communist Party, how can we be sure that we are not all in grave danger?
Here’s the issue. Even viruses as created in labs cannot avoid the essential laws and dynamics of viral infection itself. In this, there is a tradeoff between severity and prevalence. If the virus kills off the host, it does not spread, which is why gravely dangerous infections such as Ebola tend to be self-limiting. The opposite is also true: A virus with an expansive rate of transmission is by definition not very fatal.
There is one exception to this rule, and it concerns what is called latency: how long the virus can live in your body and be transmitted before you experience symptoms. It is this condition that governs the fatality rates of many viruses. The latency of COVID-19, despite wild claims early on, is about the same as an average flu. So this turned out to be a nonissue.
Can a severe virus be manufactured in a lab with a very long latency period, like you see in the movies? So far, we’ve yet to see that. It cannot be ruled out, of course. But this speaks to the central point that if there is a growing pandemic risk, it is not to be found in nature. It is going to come from a lab.
This is why gain-of-function research should be banned all over the world. At the very least, governments must stop funding it!
So there we have it. The worries about “Disease X” are really worries not about nature but about what insane thing government scientists are going to come up with next. Apart from that, pandemic risk in general has been dramatically on the decline for many decades.
In short, the answer to the question “Where is this pandemic threat?” is this: They are trying their best to create it.
