I agree with your scepticism about „terrain theory“ as a universal wherewithal.
However, I am very reluctant to take this as proof for COVID-19, or the idea of viral pandemic potential in general.
As a Historian I would like to point out a striking continuous rise in the number of victims for the Spanish Flu in the published literature over the past decade. This alone should give us reason for pause: what kind of evidence is there to buy into the concept of viral pandemics? Especially considering the involvement of many prominent eugenicists and champions of gene-therapy since the 1940‘s. Take a look at the „Future of Man“ conference held at the CIBA Foundation in London in 1962. The number of Nobel Laureats is staggering who chose to remain seated (or even join in) while colleagues discussed means of making sure the right gene-pool gets propagated within the world population! Some of these (Joshua Lederberg for instance, or Hilary Koprowski) went on to influence „Global Health Policy“ (not to say One-Health) until late in the 1990s or early years of the 21st century even. Did you know that the idea of a pandemic caused by viruses from bats in caves was around as early as 1962? Who would have thought…
This is not to imply that „viruses don’t exist“, but that virology may have been a field that showed promising potential to be used as a means to usher in gene therapy (for what reasons is another question altogether)!
I would encourage you to check out Dr. Jonathan Couey‘s program at https://stream.gigaohm.bio. He makes the point that biologically RNA can not pandemic. He used to be an academic biologist on track for a tenured position, having worked in the lab of two Nobel Laureates himself, but he got the sack early in 2020 when he spoke out against transferring healthy Humans.
It may be that his take may not be correct in total, but the fact that everyone shuns him for making the point, refusing to debate the issue (which, if true, would do away a carefully crafted narrative of the need to be prepared for pandemics - and gene therapy injections as the only way to save the world) makes me very uncomfortable. Especially if organisations such as Children’s Health Defense (which I used to work for and support) engage in stymieing the debate which must be held…
So, „terrain theory“ and „no virus“ may just be two more ways to highjack the movement into extreme positions in order to safeguard the limited spectrum of debate. „Pandemics are real“ is a claim far to general to be acceptable as an axiom in a situation where so much evidence exists of eugenicists/transhumanists/technocrats working together for decades in a field that has NOT been given close scrutiny yet. Too much is at stake to take bacterial infection and potential for health problems as a waiver for the idea of „deadly viral pandemics.“
And no, this is NOT to deny that Gain-of-Function research exists. The question is: Can RNA-molecules go around the world for years and pose a pandemic threat? JJ Couey (and Mike Yeadon) doubts it. They must be brought center stage!
Thanks, Uwe, a very interesting perspective. As Mike Baillie pointed out in his comet-theory book (p. 9), there's so much being published in one's own discipline, it's difficult to find the time and/or headspace to look into other disciplines - but that's exactly what we need to do if we're ever going to arrive at a proper understanding of the world in which we live (or used to live).
I am a scientist and an historian- you say. the Black Death 'which killed between one third and half of the population of Europe in the middle of the 14th century' what is your source for this? I investigate here https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-black-death-killed-50-of-the
It wasn't available when I studied the subject, but university students are nowadays directed to Rosemary Horrox's 1994 collection of contemporary accounts of the Black Death in the Manchester Medieval Sources series, beginning with Boccaccio's famous description of the plague in Florence in 'The Decameron.' Have you looked at Horrox's book? It's a very good collection.
The point is, people weren't making it up! They were recording what they saw. There was no TV or social media to spread mass panic in 1348. Unlike 2020-21.
I didn't get into the arguments over the precise death toll in my article because I didn't think they were relevant to the point I was making, and I know that estimates do vary a lot because they are estimates. Since you ask, one example of a specific estimate is that of Barney Sloane in 'The Black Death in London' (2011) who after looking at will-makers and tax-payers concluded that 50-60% of the population of the city had died (pp. 103-11).
Yes contemporary accounts of people getting sick sure, though i disagree there was no mass hysteria, news spread very quickly along with the fear.
Thank you for the Barney Sloane reference the problem with all these examples of how many people died is that no one has any idea at all as to how many people there were alive to start with as there was no census. A lot of people may have left London and not paid taxes, a similiar issue occurs with estimates from vacancies in the clergy, it is unknown whether they died or ran away. Extrapolations from London to the whole of country can be wildly inaccurate too.
I was only commenting as i thought you might be interested in the very thin evidence that's all.
No, thank you for engaging! I'm not arguing that there was no hysteria during the Black Death; there's plenty of evidence for that. I'm arguing that the pandemic was real and that there weren't any nefarious interests pulling the strings behind the scenes to create hysteria and manufacture a pandemic where none existed, because that wasn't the way things happened in the 14th century - unlike in 2020-21.
I think the best evidence would be to look at the changed economic conditions after the Black Death. Landowners could not find enough workers for their estates as so many serfs had died, and those remaining demanded (and won) higher wages or migrated to the cities. The Black Death led to the end of feudalism.
I look at the changed economic conditions, currer, in my post if you'd read it. Wages rising as serfs had died is also a myth. Real wages rose according to some accounts (though not by much and they hadn't been previously that low) but this could also mean that the price of wheat had declined (many areas saw a surplus at this time-so there must have been plenty of available 'serfs'). The economic conditions after the 'Black Death' can only be described as economic growth. According to Hatcher: 'The term ‘economic growth’ he says can justifiably be applied to the later 14th century’ and ‘any setbacks in production’ caused by 50% of the population dying were ‘short-lived’ and none of the things that happened in the later 14th century are ‘commensurate with a population decline of around 35-50%’! Instead of accepting that the premise is false, Hatcher and other historians continue to accept the ‘dilemma’ that the facts don’t support a mass die off of the population.'
'The continued economic growth, high real wages, high standards of living, the increases in grain production in many areas and the fluidity of migratory agricultural work not only do not support over-population nor people being forced to farm poor soil: they strongly indicate, by historians own Malthusian theory of high real wages indicating low population, that the population had not previously doubled since the last census in 1086 and that the doubling was only proposed in order to accommodate the alleged Black Death halving.' https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-black-death-killed-50-of-the
Yes, I've read your post. You pose some good questions - to which I don't have the answers. My fundamental issue with 'Black Death denial' (if one may so call it) is the same as with Holocaust denial - it relies on discounting contemporary eye-witness evidence. I can't see any legitimate reason to do that.
? there is hard evidence, physical, photographic, medical and census records for the Holocaust, it doesn’t have to rely on contemporary eye-witness accounts at all. And anything being compared to Holocaust denial, whatever it’s merits, has a huge emotive weight attached to it, it’s not an objective comparison.
Eye witness accounts from any historical era, as well as remembrances recorded some time after the event, especially from the distant past of 1347, must be read with the same rigour as any primary source to understand bias and limitations. I was not discounting it: just questioning it. Yes, there are accounts of people becoming sick, as there are with 'covid', but this doesn't show what they are sick with, what they died of, nor that this can be extrapolated to 30-50% of the population dying!
My questions do not deserve comparison to Holocaust denial in the same way that being anti-genocide in Gaza does not amount to anti-sematism.
If there are questions you can’t answer then throwing in Holocaust denial is a pretty crap way of escaping them.
I agree with your scepticism about „terrain theory“ as a universal wherewithal.
However, I am very reluctant to take this as proof for COVID-19, or the idea of viral pandemic potential in general.
As a Historian I would like to point out a striking continuous rise in the number of victims for the Spanish Flu in the published literature over the past decade. This alone should give us reason for pause: what kind of evidence is there to buy into the concept of viral pandemics? Especially considering the involvement of many prominent eugenicists and champions of gene-therapy since the 1940‘s. Take a look at the „Future of Man“ conference held at the CIBA Foundation in London in 1962. The number of Nobel Laureats is staggering who chose to remain seated (or even join in) while colleagues discussed means of making sure the right gene-pool gets propagated within the world population! Some of these (Joshua Lederberg for instance, or Hilary Koprowski) went on to influence „Global Health Policy“ (not to say One-Health) until late in the 1990s or early years of the 21st century even. Did you know that the idea of a pandemic caused by viruses from bats in caves was around as early as 1962? Who would have thought…
This is not to imply that „viruses don’t exist“, but that virology may have been a field that showed promising potential to be used as a means to usher in gene therapy (for what reasons is another question altogether)!
I would encourage you to check out Dr. Jonathan Couey‘s program at https://stream.gigaohm.bio. He makes the point that biologically RNA can not pandemic. He used to be an academic biologist on track for a tenured position, having worked in the lab of two Nobel Laureates himself, but he got the sack early in 2020 when he spoke out against transferring healthy Humans.
It may be that his take may not be correct in total, but the fact that everyone shuns him for making the point, refusing to debate the issue (which, if true, would do away a carefully crafted narrative of the need to be prepared for pandemics - and gene therapy injections as the only way to save the world) makes me very uncomfortable. Especially if organisations such as Children’s Health Defense (which I used to work for and support) engage in stymieing the debate which must be held…
So, „terrain theory“ and „no virus“ may just be two more ways to highjack the movement into extreme positions in order to safeguard the limited spectrum of debate. „Pandemics are real“ is a claim far to general to be acceptable as an axiom in a situation where so much evidence exists of eugenicists/transhumanists/technocrats working together for decades in a field that has NOT been given close scrutiny yet. Too much is at stake to take bacterial infection and potential for health problems as a waiver for the idea of „deadly viral pandemics.“
And no, this is NOT to deny that Gain-of-Function research exists. The question is: Can RNA-molecules go around the world for years and pose a pandemic threat? JJ Couey (and Mike Yeadon) doubts it. They must be brought center stage!
Thanks, Uwe, a very interesting perspective. As Mike Baillie pointed out in his comet-theory book (p. 9), there's so much being published in one's own discipline, it's difficult to find the time and/or headspace to look into other disciplines - but that's exactly what we need to do if we're ever going to arrive at a proper understanding of the world in which we live (or used to live).
I am a scientist and an historian- you say. the Black Death 'which killed between one third and half of the population of Europe in the middle of the 14th century' what is your source for this? I investigate here https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-black-death-killed-50-of-the
It wasn't available when I studied the subject, but university students are nowadays directed to Rosemary Horrox's 1994 collection of contemporary accounts of the Black Death in the Manchester Medieval Sources series, beginning with Boccaccio's famous description of the plague in Florence in 'The Decameron.' Have you looked at Horrox's book? It's a very good collection.
The point is, people weren't making it up! They were recording what they saw. There was no TV or social media to spread mass panic in 1348. Unlike 2020-21.
I didn't get into the arguments over the precise death toll in my article because I didn't think they were relevant to the point I was making, and I know that estimates do vary a lot because they are estimates. Since you ask, one example of a specific estimate is that of Barney Sloane in 'The Black Death in London' (2011) who after looking at will-makers and tax-payers concluded that 50-60% of the population of the city had died (pp. 103-11).
Yes contemporary accounts of people getting sick sure, though i disagree there was no mass hysteria, news spread very quickly along with the fear.
Thank you for the Barney Sloane reference the problem with all these examples of how many people died is that no one has any idea at all as to how many people there were alive to start with as there was no census. A lot of people may have left London and not paid taxes, a similiar issue occurs with estimates from vacancies in the clergy, it is unknown whether they died or ran away. Extrapolations from London to the whole of country can be wildly inaccurate too.
I was only commenting as i thought you might be interested in the very thin evidence that's all.
No, thank you for engaging! I'm not arguing that there was no hysteria during the Black Death; there's plenty of evidence for that. I'm arguing that the pandemic was real and that there weren't any nefarious interests pulling the strings behind the scenes to create hysteria and manufacture a pandemic where none existed, because that wasn't the way things happened in the 14th century - unlike in 2020-21.
I think the best evidence would be to look at the changed economic conditions after the Black Death. Landowners could not find enough workers for their estates as so many serfs had died, and those remaining demanded (and won) higher wages or migrated to the cities. The Black Death led to the end of feudalism.
I look at the changed economic conditions, currer, in my post if you'd read it. Wages rising as serfs had died is also a myth. Real wages rose according to some accounts (though not by much and they hadn't been previously that low) but this could also mean that the price of wheat had declined (many areas saw a surplus at this time-so there must have been plenty of available 'serfs'). The economic conditions after the 'Black Death' can only be described as economic growth. According to Hatcher: 'The term ‘economic growth’ he says can justifiably be applied to the later 14th century’ and ‘any setbacks in production’ caused by 50% of the population dying were ‘short-lived’ and none of the things that happened in the later 14th century are ‘commensurate with a population decline of around 35-50%’! Instead of accepting that the premise is false, Hatcher and other historians continue to accept the ‘dilemma’ that the facts don’t support a mass die off of the population.'
'The continued economic growth, high real wages, high standards of living, the increases in grain production in many areas and the fluidity of migratory agricultural work not only do not support over-population nor people being forced to farm poor soil: they strongly indicate, by historians own Malthusian theory of high real wages indicating low population, that the population had not previously doubled since the last census in 1086 and that the doubling was only proposed in order to accommodate the alleged Black Death halving.' https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-black-death-killed-50-of-the
Yes, I've read your post. You pose some good questions - to which I don't have the answers. My fundamental issue with 'Black Death denial' (if one may so call it) is the same as with Holocaust denial - it relies on discounting contemporary eye-witness evidence. I can't see any legitimate reason to do that.
? there is hard evidence, physical, photographic, medical and census records for the Holocaust, it doesn’t have to rely on contemporary eye-witness accounts at all. And anything being compared to Holocaust denial, whatever it’s merits, has a huge emotive weight attached to it, it’s not an objective comparison.
Eye witness accounts from any historical era, as well as remembrances recorded some time after the event, especially from the distant past of 1347, must be read with the same rigour as any primary source to understand bias and limitations. I was not discounting it: just questioning it. Yes, there are accounts of people becoming sick, as there are with 'covid', but this doesn't show what they are sick with, what they died of, nor that this can be extrapolated to 30-50% of the population dying!
My questions do not deserve comparison to Holocaust denial in the same way that being anti-genocide in Gaza does not amount to anti-sematism.
If there are questions you can’t answer then throwing in Holocaust denial is a pretty crap way of escaping them.