Mobilizing the World for Disease X: Xtremely Smart or Xtremely Pessimistic?
Enabling and Manipulating Fear of Disease Undermines the Total Health of Society
Risks to Human Health
From the day we emerge into the world, until the day we exit, our lives flourish in an environment of risk. If we amplify consciousness of any one risk by writing about it and reading about it non-stop, then we convert an otherwise potentially fulfilling life into a life of perpetual worry.
For example, consider the following things that could pose a risk to good health:
tornado
mass shooting
earthquake
solar geomagnetic storm
serial killer
stock-market crash
Tornadoes are pretty scary things. Using the Tri-State Tornado of March 25, 1925 as a benchmark (the worst in US history), we could worry that any of the 1,000 tornadoes that happen in the US per year could kill 695 people and injure 2,000 more. What if this sort of tornado happened a thousand times? - certainly unlikely, but most worry-worthy. Should we not fund a massive campaign to re-write all building codes, erect more storm shelters, require mandatory weather monitors on every person at all times (especially during summers in Kansas)?
Mass shootings are even scarier. Consider all the people who can legally own guns — any one of them at any time could snap and create a mass-casualty event! Why should we not launch a global campaign to address this?
Earthquakes! Even scarier. Wooden two-by-fours in houses should be replaced by steel beams for starters. And so much more could be done to help protect everybody, in case the big one hit without a moment's notice. Choose any worst earthquake from the past century as a benchmark against which to properly gauge the fear.
As for solar geomagnetic storms, everybody should know about the Carrington Event of 1859. If something like that happened today, the health of civilization itself would be in grave danger, let alone the health of one person. Yet, what have we done about mitigating the damage from a possible future recurrence (or worse) of such an event? Where are the financial investments, the disaster simulations, the government re-structuring efforts, and the re-writing of international laws to address this possible future threat that has not yet happened?
We could go on, with serial killers, stock-market crashes, and more. Hopefully, I have made a point — that placing a big letter "X" after the name of any risk to health elevates it to a priority deserving of continual fear and funding. So far, I propose Tornado X, Mass-shooting X, Earthquake X, Solar-geomagnetic-storm X, Serial-killer X, and Stock-market-crash X as threats to our health that do not yet exist, but which we should expend great amounts of effort and money to prepare for.
A Disease That Does Not Yet Exist
In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) seriously added the name, "Disease X", to a list of priority diseases that it deemed worthy of "accelerated research and development". This list can be found in a WHO publication titled, 2018 Annual Review of Diseases Prioritized Under the Research and Development Blueprint, on page 2.
The following article in a famous medical journal lays out the logic of expending considerable time, effort and money to prepare for an unknown pathogen ("Pathogen X") that infects the world with an obscure, as yet non-existent "Disease X":
Shmona Simpson, Michael C Kaufmann, Vitaly Glozman, and Ajoy Chakrabarti (2020). Disease X: Accelerating the Development of Medical Countermeasures for the Next Pandemic, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 20, Issue 5, E108-E115:
WHO has listed several priority diseases with epidemic potential for which there are no, or insufficient, medical countermeasures. In response, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (with support from PricewaterhouseCoopers) coordinated subject matter experts to create a preparedness plan for Disease X.
Disease X is caused by Pathogen X, an infectious agent that is not currently known to cause human disease, but an aetiologic agent of a future outbreak with epidemic or pandemic potential.
Politicized Science = Political Science
An online version of the above article includes the authors' declaration of interests, plus a link to an appendix, listing other people who collaborated in producing the "preparedness plan" that the article discusses.
The .pdf version of the article (linked to in the above full citation) does not offer a link to the appendix listing those collaborators. Why?
At the end of the article, we read:
Declaration of interests
SS [Shmona Simpson] and AC [Ajoy Chakrabarti] are employees of the Gates Foundation at the time of writing; however, this Personal View does not necessarily represent the views of the Gates Foundation. MCK [Michael C Kaufmann] and VVG [Vitaly Glozman] are employees of PricewaterhouseCoopers at the time of writing; however, this Personal View does not necessarily represent the views of PricewaterhouseCoopers. We declare no competing interests.
Acknowledgments
We thank the subject matter experts and members of the Disease X Working Group who gave their time and extensive experience towards this endeavour (listed in appendix).
The article itself plainly states that the Gates Foundation, with support of PricewaterhouseCoopers, coordinated all experts in this project. The "Declaration of interests" plainly states that two of the authors were employees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the other two authors were employees of PricewaterhouseCoopers, at the time of the article's writing.
The appendix reveals that the Disease X Working Group consisted of thirty-three people, eleven of whom were employees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and one of whom was an employee of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
A little personal research reveals that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as being the second largest contributor to WHO, has funded previous studies whose results were published in The Lancet. In addition, one of the board members of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee is also a board member of The Lancet. Even so, the authors write:
We declare no competing interests.
As authors, if you are employees of the organizations coordinating all people who produced the paper, and one of these organizations has funded studies for and has a relationship with the journal that publishes the paper (as well as largely funding the organization that originated the idea of "Disease X"), then how can you declare "no competing interests"? Such a statement simply is not true.
A collective of competing interests has put forth a plan, published in one of the most prestigious medical journals, thereby presenting the plan as an endorsement of public-health policy by that very highly-respected medical journal. The one interest that all these parties have in common is a global health security agenda that calls for a questionable, arguably overly-pessimistic, medical-countermeasure framework that uses disease fear-mongering as a promotional strategy. All this greatly benefits WHO's global governance power and the pharmaceutical industry's profits, while imperiling public health proper.
Disease Mongering
Before 2018, the phrase,"Disease X", did not appear as a wide-spread fashionable idea in writing. After WHO added it as a name (in 2018) to its official list of "priority diseases with pandemic potential", it became insanely fashionable with the news media. A virtual flood of headlines, using "Disease X", has subsequently engulfed the world. A few examples of the more laughable headlines are as follows:
DISEASE X... IT'S END OF THE WORLD: NEW BIRD FLU WARNING, ….. McKee, Ruth. Daily Star; London (UK) [London (UK)]. 16 June 2018: 21.
'SUPER FLU' SET TO KILL 80 MILLION: Warning of Disease X pandemic, ….. Caven, James. Daily Star; London (UK) [London (UK)]. 19 Sep 2019: 16.
DISEASE X: CHILLING NEW THEORY AS EUROPE PANICS EXPERT FEARS VIRUS MUTATION DEATHS TOLL 'COULD BE 80M', ….. Pisa, Nick; Wooller, Shaun. The Sun; London (UK) [London (UK)]. 25 Feb 2020: 4
Academic journals have also been captured by the phrase, as the following two examples show:
Disease X and other unknowns, ….. The Lancet; London Vol. 393, Iss. 10180, (Apr 13, 2019): 1496-1497.
Preparing for “Disease X”, ….. Science; Washington Vol. 374, Iss. 6566, (Oct 22, 2021): 377-377.
Here are a few screen shots, illustrating the sort of graphic design used to capture mass consciousness with outrageous pronouncements:
This is just a scant sampling from the deluge of headlines and titles that have clouded the information sphere.
An observant person cannot help but conclude that popular news media have become propaganda machines for disease mongering, and respected scientific journals have become marketing tools for disease mongering.
Michael A. Vance (2011) has described disease mongering as the pushing of diseases to sell medical goods or services:
He points out:
Disease mongering is simply the pharmaceutical industry and other interests using their resources to maximize sales and profits or government dole, as any good business would.
Vance emphasizes that the scientific community has lost its capacity to review and to sustain its priorities:
Disease mongering explains why these priorities and perspectives are out of balance.
When disease mongering is legitimized by government and promoted by credentialed scientists, perceived by the public—and even worse by themselves—as objective thinkers immune from self-deception, a passive, uncritical populace is created.
From this perspective, "Disease X" would appear to be the crème de la crème of disease mongering.
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