The Pandemic Industry is Preparing for its Next Bonanza

The pandemic agenda, important to maintaining a healthy market for mRNA vaccines, is reliant on a general sense of fear and urgency to achieve success. Mitigating against this is the unfortunate decline in infectious disease and dearth of recent naturally derived pandemics. With COVID-19 fading and looking worryingly unnatural in origin, the pandemic industry is developing an increasing interest in ancient history, when its offerings may have proven more useful.

In the year 1347 the armies of the Kipchak Turkic confederation under the Khan Janibeg, who were attacking the Genoese fortress at Kaffa in the Crimea, catapulted dead bodies over the walls into the city. This was not done simply for aesthetics. It was an early form of biowarfare. The bodies had belonged to people who died of a new plague that had spread from Central Asia to devastate the Kipchak army. The survivors, figuring out that once a bunch of people had this plague it spread to almost everyone in close contact, decided that they should share this knowledge with the Genoese defenders as well. The airborne corpse approach did the trick.

Soon after, some of the defenders sailing home to Italy stopped off at Syracuse in Sicily for provisions and some shore time (or perhaps in desperation to leave pestilence-ridden ships). Attempts to quarantine them were too late, and the Black Death had entered Europe. It would have got there overland anyway, but in this age of expanding international travel driven by galley slaves and improved harnessing of the wind, spread happened lightning fast and it had reached England by the following year. Bubonic plague spread from port to city to village by people and rats, or the fleas ubiquitous to both.

Rats were everywhere in the open sewers that served as streets in cities such as London, the rancid food stores that served as Medieval pantries, the stinking stables that served as garages. People packed into city slums, legs bent with rickets on diets of stale bread and gin, were incapable of mounting decent immune responses to the plague-causing bacteria – or for that matter to tuberculosis, poxes large and small, or dozens of microorganisms that we generally brush off today. Sleeping four to a bed and 10 to a room, an infection of one was rapidly shared.

The Black Death killed up to one in four people in parts of Europe and likely did the same in Asia. Mass graves are still uncovered at modern construction sites. If you had survived childhood in those days, which most children didn’t, then plagues and outbreaks of pestilence were a common, persistent threat.

Dealing with the problem of declining mortality

In common with most pandemics of former times – of which history records many – the causative organism of the Black Death, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is no longer a threat. Short of a total breakdown of society and a new Dark Age, Y. pestis will never cause a pandemic again. Antibiotics get rid of it, but most importantly, we have underground sewers and clean water, eat food that allows our immune systems to function more effectively, have larger cleaner houses not running with rats, and we know what causes such diseases and how to avoid the really bad ones.

Irrespective of the above, the leading lights of international public health want us and our governments to believe everything is getting worse. The WHO has invented ‘Disease-X‘ because the real outbreak diseases it must deal with don’t provide scary enough numbers of dead. The G20 through its High Level Independent Panel and World Bank have misrepresented pandemic risk to our governments since COVID-19 to convince them to increase their funding for this “existential threat”. Their problem has been that 1) recent history does not provide outbreak mortality they need, and 2) COVID-19 looks increasingly likely to have arisen from the actions of their pandemic industrial complex rather than the natural origin they need to justify their claims (and avoid blame).

To overcome the problem of declining infectious disease and outbreak mortality, international public health has adopted a new modelling approach reliant on medieval plagues and other historical mass death events. These events are then applied to today’s nine billion global population whilst ignoring progress in society and technology (and anything else). This is then used to scare governments into parting with more money.

Such modelling, obviously, can produce enormous numbers of deaths. Applying these to today’s population provides an average hypothetical annual pandemic mortality for respiratory viruses of about 2.5 million per year. Suddenly, ‘The Science’ can tell you that more people will die on average each year from acute pandemics than any day-to-day infectious diseases (seemingly dull stuff like tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS). What’s conveniently omitted is that nearly all these 2.5 million ‘adjusted people’ died after the 1347 Klipchak biowarfare experiment or similar long-forgotten disasters in a world barely recognizable today.

To understand the enormity of the feat of apparent subterfuge employed here, recall that infectious disease mortality has plummeted as a cause of death for the last couple of centuries overall, especially in wealthy countries. A high mortality event (i.e., higher than their modelled 2.5 million per year average) has not happened since the Spanish Flu in the pre-antibiotic era over a century ago. Reported COVID-19 mortality, according to the WHO, almost reached ‘average’ levels with just over seven million deaths from 2020 to 2022. These were, we are to believe, normal years. Yet this is what our governments were fed at the recent G20 meeting in South Africa, and the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health would have us agree. This is the level of rigour that the big dollars in global health are based on.

Disease modelling, when done in this way, frees us from the tyranny of data and reality. Mirages such as Disease-X become existential threats to humanity, survivable only by giving lots of money to the right people and disrupting the lives of the rest in ‘whole-of-society’ approaches. This matters because the WHO and World Bank are seeking in total over $30 billion for this, and about another $10.5 billion for One Health. By contrast, the world spends just $3.5 billion on malaria, which really does kills over 600,000 actual children each year and is getting worse.

Turning fear into return on investment

Although the pandemic response is much too late to fix the medieval plagues used to justify it, it remains of great relevance to Pharma investors who see unbeatable advantage in converting taxation dollars into rising share valuations. Governments supporting the CEPI 100-day vaccine initiative are giving public money to support the research and maintain manufacturing readiness of private companies who will then sell their products back to the very same taxpayers, ideally mandated by those governments. This will occur in response to disease surveillance that the same hapless taxpayers are funding. A whole army of global health bureaucrats is positioning to run this – these officials only need a theoretical risk to recommend lockdowns. The 100-day mRNA vaccines will return freedom. The business case here is simply irresistible.

How can a whole global health industry be convinced to deprioritise real disease burdens in favour of corporate profit? Up to about 40 years ago, the main determinants of health that allow those in wealthy countries to live twice as long as previous generations were well accepted: improved diet, sanitation, better housing, antibiotics, less rats. We had figured out that 1) bacteria and viruses exist and promote a lot of illness, and 2) malnourished people (e.g. lacking vitamin D, zinc and various other micronutrients) are much less able to withstand them. We had a strong basis for insisting on clean water, piping sewerage off the streets, diagnosis and treating infection early, prioritising fresh food and the use of vitamin supplements. Most vaccines came after the heavily lifting of cutting disease burden had been done by other means, but some are also relevant. Humankind had known about separating latrines from drinking water and eating fresh fruit for eons, but science opened these benefits for all, not just an educated elite.

If 1918’s Spanish Flu happened today, mortality would be far lower. Most victims are thought to have died of secondary bacterial infections readily treatable now with antibiotics, or even of aspirin overdose.  While Y. pestis persists to cause occasional small outbreaks, the conditions for it to cause mass plagues are gone. The largest ever Ebola outbreak, in West Africa in 2014, equalled just four days of tuberculosis deaths. The largest recent cholera outbreak, caused by the UN failing to manage basic sanitation in its Haiti compound, killed less than Ebola.  

We need mathematical models to sell pandemic preparedness because in the modern world the risk of natural pandemics is mostly gone. Gain of Function and lab leaks are not, but the prevention measures for them are completely different.

Choosing between reality or historic drama

Put another way, the international public health industry is becoming a sham. A vast workforce is living a lie to ensure its continued expansion whilst acting as a market development agency for Pharma. It is relying on medieval data to sell essentially useless but very costly talismans to the modern world. We really have two choices: go back to a medieval lifestyle so that all this becomes relevant, or accept the reality of declining infectious disease.

If we accept reality, then we can direct our resources to the actual burden that remains and the determinants of good health that freed most of us from them. Unfortunately, such evidence-based approaches predominantly help those with poor ability to pay. Those directing global health policy now have corporate bottom lines to consider, and have proven they can pull any sort of medieval trick out of the bag to achieve it.

Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was programme head for malaria and acute febrile disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.