Read a Book, Wear a Mask: Debunking ‘Plandemic’ with an Explanation of Zoonotic Viruses
I love to read, anyone who knows me knows this. I picked up Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone at last during my senior year of undergrad. I was enthralled by the gory descriptions of sloughing tongues and exploding bowels. And to think that a virus could do all of this? That these small creatures are invisible to my naked eye and yet live on all kinds of surfaces I touch all day? That there are unique and terrifying forms in different parts of the world?
After The Hot Zone, I picked up The Next Pandemic, by Ali S. Khan, a former investigative epidemiologist for the Center for Disease Control. Having investigated Ebola, Swine Flu, SARS, and so on, Khan was convinced that not only would the next great global challenge take the form of a pandemic, but that it would not be something like Ebola, it would be something like SARS, or a new strain of deadly flu. Something that mutates quickly, subtly, and something where the “familiarity” and lack of a fear factor slows individual and international response. I remember thinking something like “Wow, that’s really scary. I hope I can work in a job one day where I can bring this issue up.” Well, COVID-19 beat me to it, and right in the middle of my latest read, Quammen’s Spillover.
So, there are few things that I need to talk about. A disclaimer: I am not a virologist, nor an epidemiologist. I’m a social scientist with a side passion for disease geography and history.
I want to frame my discussion points in parallel with the viral Plandemic video. I missed this wonderful art piece when it first made its debut in May, isolated within my own Facebook echo chamber. It’s existence and importance was revealed to me by a coworker and he framed it in such a way as to imply that the video was removed from various social media platforms by a contingent of liberal, Chinese?, and anti-Trump biased democrats. I don’t want to give this video any more attention, I want to let it die. I want to lift a shovel and help bury it. But it’s not just dying, its being martyred. I’m not going to address the whole Qanon slash deep state conspiracy here, I just want to talk about a few particular claims made in the Plandemic video that don’t make sense from what we know of how viruses operate.
The video is one long interview of Dr. Judy Mikovits, a supposed “leading expert” in her field. This NPR report does a fair job of fact-checking Mikovits story of being unjustly imprisoned, as well as addressing her claims of being silenced by Dr. Fauci, but I intend to dive a bit deeper into her assertions about virus evolution.
I want to focus on one specific claim, that virus mutation processes which allow them to infect humans, or jump hosts, can take over 800 years. NPR briefly touches on this, by pointing out that the reason we need a new flu vaccine every year is because the flu evolves so rapidly. What they don’t mention and what is explored by Ali S. Khan in his recorded experience: the flu evolves so rapidly that each year there are hundreds of different strains. The “flu vaccine” that is administered every year, the one you can get at Walmart or CVS, is in fact a vaccine for a particular strain or two that scientists have taken a “best guess” will be most prominent that year. Even people who get that vaccine can still succumb to other strains that they encounter throughout the year. The very reason that flu still kills so many people around the world each year is not a point in favor of the ineffectiveness of vaccines but instead that viruses mutate, and the flu virus mutates incredibly quickly, in a matter of months and even weeks, rather than centuries. Maybe you’re reading this and you’re like, “gee, thanks, I already knew that”. I’m not trying to be redundant but it is important to debunk as many of these smaller claims as well, because every little lie or misrepresentation made throughout this video adds up into one giant conspiracy that threatens public understanding of viruses and therefore endangers public health. We have been warned that equating COVID- 19 to the flu is dangerous since it implies that we are familiar with its track and that its effect will be mild for most people. Even though we have seen that we were massively under-prepared, we better hope that COVID-19 is not like the flu or the “common cold” in its ability to mutate. That particular comparison should actually scare people.
David Quammen points out that this tendency of viruses to mutate results in another advantage for viruses: the ability to jump hosts. A quick sidenote: a host, or carrier, in virology refers to a species that carries a virus or bacteria. The virus may or may not kill the host and the host may or may not be asymptomatic (showing no recognizable symptoms). Other terms that will pop up include agent and reservoir. An agent refers to the virus or bacteria, while reservoir refers to a species within which the virus naturally occurs: For example, smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, after the last human case was isolated, since humans are the only reservoir for naturally occurring smallpox.
Zoonosis refers to the process by which a virus found in animals begins infecting humans. It is an example of “spillover”, when a virus infects a new host species. We know from experience with Ebola, SARS, Swine Flu, Spanish Flu, Malaria, AIDS, and now COVID-19 that this process does not take 800 years. Sometimes, as the case with malaria, it is thought to occur through a single bite, the wrong mosquito biting the wrong human resulting in the perfect mutation of a strain of malaria that becomes lethal to human beings. That strain is then carried through other mosquitoes to other human beings.
In the case of Ebola, we still don’t know exactly where the virus naturally resides in the wild, and we see a debate over wave versus particle theory of ebola outbreaks. We know that most Ebola outbreaks (referred to by the CDC as EVD or Ebola Virus Disease to encompass multiple strains of the filovirus Ebola including Bundibugyo, Zair, Reston, Sudan, and Taï Forest ebolavirus, each named for the regions or countries in which they were first identified) have occurred due to increased human interaction and encroachment on the jungle environment. It’s worth pointing out, as NPR did, that these ebolavirus infections began around 1976, more than a couple of years before Mikovits claims to have worked on teaching ebolavirus to infect human cells. Individuals who participate in hunting, salvaging, or cooking of what is referred to as “bushmeat”, or various animals hunted for food including chimpanzees, come down with fever, muscle pains, and bleeding. In this case, the ebolavirus makes a single jump from a carrier to human beings through blood and bodily fluid.
Some zoonoic viruses use a few stepping-stones of hosts to hop to human beings. Hendra virus, first recognized in early 1990s Australia, hopped from bats to horses and then to humans, but was unable to hop directly from reservoir bats to human beings. In this instance, horses served as an amplifier host, or a species in which the virus was able to rapidly multiply and accumulate to high enough levels to be passed on to another host. Pigs serve as amplifier hosts for strains of flu and other diseases including encephalitis. Yet another phrase worth mentioning here is “emergence” which refers to when an agent thrives and spreads in a new host species. The aforementioned outbreak of Hendra was not emergence, merely a candidate, according to Quammen, since the virus did not thrive in human beings — it did not spread from person to person, and the only humans who contracted it were exposed to large colonies of the viruses from infected horses.In contrast, COVID- 19 represents an emergence of a new zoonotic disease — it is highly contagious, and it spread across the globe in a handful of months, infected millions and killed thousands.
As far as the Plandemic video is concerned, I’m not saying that there’s never any merit to questioning authority, and challenging official narratives, but consider which narratives you are challenging and from whom. Before posting possible misinformation about COVID- 19 consider the following facts:
- We don’t yet know the exact origin of COVID-19, but we believe it to be zoonotic, since many of the first known cases visited the same Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and the virus is closely related to groups of coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins, as well as to SARS.
- A University of Edinburgh study published in 2005 found that of 1,407 recognized species of pathogens found in humans, 58% were zoonotic, or the result of spillover events of animal pathogens.
- A parallel survey conducted by Kate E. Jones of the Zoological Society in 2008 found that portion of emerging zoonotic viruses found in human beings with a wildlife origin is increasing over time, and that these viruses represent the greatest threat to global health. This has greater implications for the relationships of human beings to their environment including trends like deforestation and the culture of exotic animal dishes in high society cultures in places like Southern China.
- At the time of writing, confirmed COVID-19 cases total over 10,000,000 worldwide, with total deaths surpassing 500,000. Something else that the Plandemic video does is include clips of people dressed in scrubs (I say people because the documentary does not provide names or positions for these individuals, so we don’t actually know what medical licensing they have) telling their audiences that they have in some cases been encouraged to record causes of death as COVID-19 for patients who dies from pneumonia-like symptoms but who were not tested for the novel coronavrius. They claim this as suspicious, but since these patients were not tested, how can we — and considering the contagious nature of this disease, where exactly is the harm in being overly cautious, especially considering the precautions that should be taken in the handling of remains if COVID-19 is present?
My point with all of this is that we cannot take the explanations provided in Plandemic at face value. As with anything we find on the internet, we have to do our own fact-checking, and that includes researching the individual making the assertions, even if we desperately want to believe them. There is just not any historical scientific backing to the claims made in the video relating to the origin of COVID-19 before we even get into the credibility of those appearing. I reference a lot of books here because these are first-hand accounts that have been published and peer reviewed, provide sources, and histories of disease. We live in a day and age where anyone can splice together an interview with some Facebook Live streams and call it a documentary, but it would be a mistake to treat every source equally.
In addition, while the act of taking down the video on Facebook and Twitter has been seen by some as the deep state looking to bury the truth, these social media outlets site a new trend of commitment to stopping the spread of false information. And anyways, if this one video really could take down the Democratic arm of the United States government, surely they could block you from viewing it after typing “plandemic” into your Google or Bing search bar? That would fall more in line with the contingent myth of a liberal bias in tech and media.
The response to the Pandemic video, as well as the emerging battle over mandates to wear face masks point to a larger trend of politicization: we have the data, and the years of scientific evidence, and yet something as simple as wearing face masks has turned into a United States culture war. Even when presented with evidence that masks may help curb transmission rates, a loud minority insists that mandating face coverings is recourse only for a tyrannical government. In this case, the debate is no longer an equal exchange of facts and legality, but a cycle of constantly rephrasing scientific evidence in an attempt to counter emotional backlash: a concoction of stubbornness and a uniquely American martyr complex.
The United States Centre for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, people with autoimmune disorders, the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions are asking you to do the bare minimum as hundreds of people continue to die every day due to a global catastrophe. One that experts have cautioned us about for years. If they’re right, you can avoid transmitting the virus to your neighbours, friends and fellow shoppers, and probably avoid catching it yourself (if you also follow social distancing and hand washing guidelines regularly) by wearing a mask. If they’re wrong, you look a bit silly wearing a cheap face covering when you look back over your 2020 selfies. Why not at least pretend that your fellow citizens matter more to you than your right to walk around and mouth breathe on passerbys?
Originally published at http://canyouseemenow.blog on July 2, 2020.
