Ignoring the Evidence

A historical perspective on the germ versus terrain argument

In my last Substack article, a review of Jenny Goodman’s new book Getting Healthy in Toxic Times, I criticised the tendency of many of us in the freedom movement to abandon critical thinking and to proceed from understanding that government and media are lying to us to automatically assuming that whatever is the opposite of the official narrative must necessarily be the truth.

Nowhere is this process more evident than in the popularity within the freedom movement of the ‘terrain’ theory of disease. Because we have been lied to from the beginning about the origins and virulence of COVID-19, and about how best to protect ourselves, many in the movement have gone to the opposite extreme and argued that no such disease as COVID-19 exists, and indeed that no such malady could ever have existed because the entire concept of infectious disease is a fallacy, and that when people exhibit what have been traditionally described as symptoms of an infectious illness, they are in fact detoxing chemicals from their system.

I do have views on the detox issue but I won’t be going into them here, as I’m not a medical expert. I have no intention of examining the terrain theory on medical or scientific grounds, but rather on the basis of history.

Ever since human beings first settled down in permanent communities alongside their animals (and crops), infectious disease has played a major role in our history. It’s impossible to understand the story of the last ten thousand years without taking into account of the role of infectious disease. It helps to explain the rise and fall of civilisations and empires. It influenced the results of many of the great battles. To deny infectious disease is to deny the study of history itself.

I have had many (occasionally heated) arguments with other members of the freedom movement on this topic. Often these discussions prove pointless because my interlocutors are so wedded to their conviction that infectious diseases don’t exist that they aren’t prepared even to consider the historical evidence. It’s just like arguing with people on the other side of the Great Divide who refuse to acknowledge the possibility that they might be mistaken about the efficacy of lockdown and about the safety and effectiveness of the COVID ‘vaccinations,’ so refuse to look at evidence that might lead them to a different conclusion. As is often said, it’s impossible to reason someone out of a position that he didn’t reason himself into in the first case. One can try winning over people on an emotional level, but not on a rational one.

The terrain-theory ‘bible’ here in the UK is What Really Makes You Ill by Dawn Lester and David Parker (2019), which has often been touted to me by other members of the freedom movement. I know that Lester and Parker spent many years researching their book, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. I won’t be commenting on their medical and scientific opinions, for reasons I’ve already given. Some of their historical arguments are tendentious, to say the least. Here’s a link to the website:

https://whatreallymakesyouill.com

To promote their conception of the terrain theory, Lester and Parker argue that the most famous pandemic in history, the Black Death, which killed between one third and half of the population of Europe in the middle of the 14th century, was not in fact caused by an infectious agent (the plague bacterium) but by chemical poisoning by toxic debris from a comet. They state (pp. 144-5) that they’re relying on a book by the late Professor Mike Baillie of Queen’s University, Belfast, called New Light on the Black Death: the Cosmic Connection, which appeared in 2006.

When I studied the history of the Black Death at university two generations ago, we were taught it was caused by bubonic plague spread by fleas living on infected black rats. In the intervening decades several scientists and historians have revised this interpretation, because it doesn’t explain the speed with which the disease spread, nor the distance it covered, nor the fact that it killed just as many people in winter as in summer. It has been suggested that the Black Death was actually caused by another type of bacterium, such as anthrax, or by a virus, such as ebola, or by pneumonic rather than bubonic plague, spread directly from person to person rather than via rats and/or fleas.

Lester and Parker do not investigate these alternative explanations, which all envisage the Black Death as an even more contagious disease than the traditional interpretation. Having decided that the Black Death could not possibly have been caused by an infectious agent, they looked around for a theory to support their preconception that it must have been caused by something else. They thought they had found their answer in Baillie’s book.

Baillie (who died last year) was a dendrochronologist and palaeoecologist (someone who studies the history of the interaction between organisms and their environment). Lester and Parker summarise the hypothesis of his book as follows: a comet crashed into the earth just before the Black Death, releasing a cocktail of poisonous gases, which caused the deaths of millions of people across Europe.

That’s not actually what Baillie wrote. He did suggest that the earth was struck by a comet which released poisonous gases, in particular ammonia, but he took pains to stress that ‘it is not being claimed here that the Black Death was a mass poisoning by high concentrations of ammonia’ (p. 176). His theory was that the presence of ammonia and other toxic chemicals in the atmosphere (and consequently also in drinking water) might have killed some people directly but also weakened many others who would then have succumbed to one or more of a range of infectious diseases to which they were exposed (p. 188).

That’s not a million miles from my own understanding of the causation of the Black Death, which is that people fell victim to a novel infectious disease to which they hadn’t developed immunity, having been weakened by famine as a result of crop failures. These failures are suggested by tree-ring and ice-core evidence of poor weather conditions.

It is possible that the bad weather could have been caused by a comet crashing into the earth. But there’s no good evidence for a comet collision just before the Black Death. Baillie based his hypothesis of such an impact on contemporary reports of earthquakes, on the presence of ammonia in ice-core data, and on a single unverified and unverifiable reference to a ‘black comet’ in 1347 published in a history of the weather four centuries later.

If there had been a comet in the sky, surely contemporary chroniclers of the Black Death would have made a lot of it? They don’t mention one. The notion of comets as portents of disaster ranked high in the medieval mind. The most famous such example was the appearance of Halley’s Comet above England in April 1066, illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry as a portent of the demise of Anglo-Saxon England at the hands of invaders from Normandy six months later.

If people had died from poisonous gases released by a comet, surely they would all have been killed at once rather than sequentially over the course of several years? The historical record shows that the Black Death spread in a manner corresponding to the progress of an infectious disease. When choosing between different explanations, one should always apply the Occam’s Razor principle and plump for the simpler answer, unless there is a very good reason to believe otherwise.

The comet theory of the Black Death also fails to account for the regular subsequent outbreaks of the same disease throughout Europe for several hundred years afterwards. When Lester and Parker claim that the Black Death ‘suddenly erupted, prevailed for a number of years and then suddenly disappeared’ (p. 143), they’re just plain wrong.

In the Middle Ages, people thought comets portended disasters, but they didn’t believe they caused them. The Black Death was ascribed by contemporaries both to astrological causes – to a conjunction of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter in 1345 – and to a decision by G_d to punish the public for not leading sufficiently Christian lives. But they also understood about contagion.

Friar John Clynn of Kilkenny is best remembered in the history of the Black Death for the poignant statement in his account of it that he had left blank pages of parchment at the end in case anyone should still be alive in future and in a position to complete his work. He wrote:

‘Since the beginning of the world it has been unheard of for so many people to die of pestilence, famine or other infirmity in such a short time. This pestilence was so contagious that those who touched the dead or the sick were immediately infected themselves and died, so that penitent and confessor were carried together to the grave. Because of their fear and horror, men could hardly bring themselves to perform the pious and charitable acts of visiting the sick and burying the dead.’

There are also many accounts in contemporary chronicles of lawyers visiting a dying man to draw up his will, catching the disease and following him immediately to the grave.

It was in response to the Black Death that Mediterranean seaports introduced the principle of quarantine - isolating people arriving by ship for several weeks to see if they had brought the sickness with them, to ensure they would not infect the local population.

People in the 14^th century might not have had any idea of germ theory (believing instead in the notion of ‘corrupted’ or ‘pestilential’ air) but they understood the contagious nature of the illness from their own observations.

Might Lester and Parker have not done better to have admitted that the evidence of the Black Death fails to fit their terrain hypothesis, rather than scrabble around to find the one theory which they thought suited them, and then misrepresent it in order to fit their preconceived conclusion?

It’s ironical considering their own prejudice that in their discussion of the Black Death Lester and Parker criticise the ‘inherent tendency to view historical events in the light of prevailing theories’ (p. 144).

A conscientious researcher should always begin with the evidence and go wherever it takes him. Lester and Parker are far from alone in this failing nowadays. Too many so-called works of history are actually polemics, where the authors have started with an argument and then cherry-picked the evidence to support it. (I’ll say more about this when I return to the topic of Holocaust denial.)

Similar problems apply to Lester’s and Parker’s attempt to attribute the mass extinction of the Indians of Central and South America following the Spanish conquest to anything other than infectious disease.

There are some arguments over historic population data, but it’s generally agreed that nine-tenths of the Amerindian population died as a consequence of the Spanish invasion of their continent in the 16th century. For example, the population of central Mexico fell from 25 million in 1519 to 1.3 million in 1595. So a human catastrophe dramatically greater even than the Black Death.

The stories of the destruction of the Aztec empire in Mexico and the Inca empire in Peru at the hands of a few hundred Spanish conquistadores were once well known to everyone who learnt history at school. The Spanish had four weapons the Indians lacked – horses, guns, artillery, and immunity to the smallpox that they brought with them to the Americas. It’s moot whether the conquistador leader Hernán Cortés would have been able to capture (and destroy) the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1521 had it not been for an epidemic of smallpox among the Aztecs defending it. 

According to received wisdom, the dramatic decline in the Amerindian population during the 16^th century should be attributed principally to smallpox and other infectious diseases brought by the Spanish to the Americas. According to Lester and Parker, they died because they were worked to death in the silver mines. Lester and Parker are convinced they’ve found support for their contention in a book by American historian David Stannard called American Holocaust which was published in 1992 to commemorate the quincentenary of Columbus’ arrival in America.

It's true that Stannard described how Indians were worked to death in the Spanish silver mines but he did also state that many of the Indians died from infectious diseases. Lester and Parker acknowledge his saying this, but go on to insist that ‘this reference to diseases must be disregarded’ (p. 123). Why must it be disregarded? It does seem a tad inconsistent to rely on a work of history where it suits your theories but then dismiss it out of hand where it doesn’t.

Lester’s and Parker’s account of Stannard’s book is not entirely accurate. Stannard didn’t merely state that many of the Indians died from infectious diseases as well as being worked to death in the silver mines; he accepted the historical orthodoxy that the demographic decline should be explained primarily by smallpox and other diseases imported to the Americas from Europe (p. xii).

Stannard emphasised the brutal murders of Indians, and the appalling working conditions to which many of them were subjected, because his purpose in writing the book was to argue that the enormous death rate among Amerindians following the Spanish conquest should be regarded as a deliberate genocide. Hence its title, American Holocaust.

Stannard’s perspective is anti-colonialist: he used to teach American Studies at the University of Hawaii, and his long-term partner was a prominent Hawaiian nationalist and campaigner for indigenous rights. His book needs to be understood in this context.

Lester and Parker commend Stannard for his reliance on ‘eyewitness accounts written by people such as Bartolomé de Las Casas’ about atrocities committed by the Spanish invaders (p. 123). Las Casas, a friar who held the official title of ‘Protector of the Indians,’ is best remembered for his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies which he presented to the Spanish Council of the Indies in 1542 to persuade them to implement decrees to protect the Indians. So, for political reasons (just like Stannard), he emphasised the cruelty of the Spanish over the role of disease in accounting for the deaths of Indians.

Many of Las Casas’ contemporaries disagreed with his perspective. Another Spanish friar, Toribio de Benavente, wrote to the Spanish king in 1555 to contradict Las Casas and insist that the dramatic death toll was caused principally by infectious disease rather than by the cruelty of the colonists. He described Las Casas as ‘a grievous man, restless, importunate, turbulent, injurious, and prejudicial.’

The clearest demonstration that the most of the Indians died from infectious disease rather than at the hands of the Spaniards is that they died wherever Europeans settled, regardless of the type of colonial regime imposed. Those living under the supposedly benign administration of the friars still died in huge numbers, if maybe not quite so huge as those forced to work in appalling conditions in the silver mines.

Although many of the Spanish colonists did treat their native workforce very badly, they were well aware of their dependence on Indian labourers in their mines, so tried to protect them from infectious diseases, such as by imposing quarantine in the Andes (in the 1580s) in an attempt to stop the progress of epidemics from port cities in New Granada (now Colombia) to the silver mines at Potosí in Peru (now Bolivia).

It was actually the English colonists in North America, rather than the Spanish in Latin America, who were happy to witness the Indians die from diseases such as smallpox, because they saw them as standing in the way of their project to create their own New World.

When I’ve pointed out all of this to other members of the freedom movement, so wedded are some of them to what they regard as the impossibility of the Indians having been all but wiped out by infectious disease, they have suggested that the Spanish chroniclers must have been ‘making it up,’ insisting that history is written by the victors (as indeed it is). In their account of the deaths of the Amerindians, Lester and Parker, too, seek to connect them with the ‘medical establishment … perpetuating the myth that it was “germs” that killed many millions of people’ (p. 123).

Why on earth would 16^th-century authors have wanted to invent a story about the Indians dying from smallpox? Rather than exaggerate the impact of smallpox on the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas chose to downplay it, for political reasons. His critic Toribio de Benavente was most concerned about the religious implication of Indians dying from smallpox. If they perished without having first been baptised, their souls would suffer torment. He personally baptised 400,000 Indians.

Secular colonists were less concerned about the suffering of the Indians, because they considered them a lesser race of people. There would have been no reason for them to invent a story about disease to minimise their complicity in the destruction of the Indians. Indeed, one of Stannard’s principal arguments in support of his contention that the colonists’ treatment of the Indians amounted to ‘genocide,’ was that they regarded the natives as racially inferior. He explicitly makes the comparison with the Nazis’ attitude towards the Jews.

Nor could there have been any reason for 16^th-century chroniclers to lie to placate Big Pharma, because no such organisation then existed. Nobody was trying to impose smallpox vaccines on the world. It was another two centuries before the notion of inoculating against smallpox arrived in Europe. The germ theory of disease did not yet exist. There was no ‘medical establishment’ in the modern sense of the term.

There’s a tendency within the freedom movement to dismiss history as we’ve been taught it as nothing but propaganda designed to serve a particular narrative. This ignores the dynamic nature of historical debate, in which historians are constantly revising the work of their predecessors - as demonstrated by the arguments over the method of transmission of the Black Death, and over the respective roles of Spanish cruelty and infectious disease in the destruction of the American Indians. Anyone proposing a theory that’s unsupported by evidence should be called out for it.

The Indians themselves perfectly well realised they succumbed to diseases to which the Spaniards appeared immune, which they (the Indians) attributed to the superiority of the Spanish god over their own – so one consequence of the near-eradication of the Indian population by smallpox was that many of the survivors became enthusiastic adherents of Catholic Christianity.

To give them credit, at least Lester and Parker have recognised that the role of infectious disease in human history appears to undermine their terrain theory, and have attempted to address the subject; other proponents of the terrain theory have simply ignored this particular elephant in the room. But Lester and Parker have approached the topic the wrong way round – beginning with their conclusion, and then looking for evidence to support it. Arguing backwards from theory to evidence is the same misdeed that’s committed by proponents of mainstream medicine when they start from the position that homeopathy cannot possibly work and therefore disregard all the proof that it works very well.

The Black Death and smallpox in the Americas are not the only two putative epidemics addressed by Lester and Parker in their book. They also discuss the Spanish ‘flu of 1918 and the more recent history of AIDS. In these two instances they make some good points. The difference between the Black Death and smallpox on the one hand, and Spanish ‘flu and AIDS on the other, is that after examining the evidence it’s illogical to conclude otherwise than that the victims of the Black Death and smallpox died from infectious disease, whereas it’s likely that many of the deaths attributed to ‘Spanish ‘flu’ in 1918 were actually caused by toxic experimental vaccines or even by overdoses of aspirin, and that most of the deaths ascribed to AIDS, at least in developed Western countries, should be blamed on a combination of dangerously unhealthy lifestyles and the toxic ‘anti-retroviral’ drug AZT.

COVID-19 sits in a comparable category to Spanish ‘flu and AIDS. The evidence indicates that (a) there was no COVID ‘pandemic’ and (b) the majority of deaths attributed to COVID-19 were caused either by other factors, or by mistreatment or lack of treatment of sick people. I would argue that a key element of fear-mongering over COVID lay in linking it in people’s minds with genuine historical pandemics which did kill millions. In researching this essay I came across several articles by historians from 2020-21 which explicitly made the connection between COVID and pandemics such as the Black Death. I think it’s the duty of a historian to distinguish genuine historical pandemics from subsequent psy-ops that have played upon folk memories of mass deaths from epidemic disease. Unfortunately, most historians don’t do this, because their academic positions depend on their silence.

There’s no room here for a discussion of the role of infectious disease in determining the outcome of historic naval and military campaigns, such as the second Armada, two centuries after the first one, which was ready to invade the coast of England when the sailors on board ship were struck down by smallpox, and the slave rebellion on Sainte-Dominique (modern Haiti) which succeeded largely because the colonial forces sent to suppress it were overcome with yellow fever, and Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Russia, which failed principally because his soldiers succumbed to typhus.

Readers interested in investigating this subject further can choose from several books about the significance of infectious epidemic diseases in human history, but these do have to be read with great care because they’re all written from the perspective of wanting to emphasise the terrible damage wrought upon mankind by infectious diseases in order to praise the wondrous miracle of vaccination that has supposedly saved us from them.

I certainly don’t support the argument that the introduction of vaccines has saved us all from dying from infectious disease. It’s clear that the dramatic decline in deaths from communicable illnesses in developed countries should be explained by improvements in sanitation, nutrition and general living conditions, rather than by vaccination (or, in the case of bacterial diseases, by antibiotics). Deaths from tuberculosis, scarlet fever, cholera, whooping cough, diptheria and measles, among other illnesses, had already declined dramatically before vaccines and antibiotics were introduced. Many readers will no doubt be aware of the book Dissolving Illusions by Suzanne Humphreys and Roman Bystrianyk, which covers this topic.

One reason why members of the freedom movement so often quarrel about the terrain versus germ theory issue is that they’re arguing at cross-purposes, having failed to define terms. Many proponents of the terrain theory do insist, like Lester and Parker, that there’s no such thing as an infectious disease. But others simply believe that the terrain is more important than the germ, and that if people look after themselves, eat healthily, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, and maintain their emotional and spiritual wellbeing, they’re much less likely to succumb to an infectious disease. When one talks of the terrain versus germ debate, one does need to make it clear to which version of the argument one is referring.

I’d place myself in the second category, among those who believe the terrain is more important than the germ. The histories of the Black Death and the destruction of the Amerindians by smallpox support this version of the theory by demonstrating that people who have been weakened by poor nutrition or oppressive working conditions are more likely to succumb to an infectious disease. The argument that the terrain is more important than the germ is the corollary of the contention that cases of infectious disease have declined principally because of better health and living conditions rather than because of vaccination or antibiotics.

I’ve tried to show why, from an historical perspective, I think that the ‘fundamentalist’ version of the terrain theory is nonsense – the argument that nobody has ever died from an infectious disease, because these illnesses have never existed. From a political perspective, my concern with the widespread support for this theory within the freedom movement is that it gives ammunition to our opponents and makes it easier for them to ridicule us for not thinking rationally – which is of course exactly what we accuse them of doing. We need to be better than them, not the mirror image.