Do Your Own Research

A lot of the most vocal opponents of vaccines and lockdowns and people who scream ‘plandemic’ often go on about doing your own research. So I did. Chances are you’re not going to like it whether you agree with it or not. It’s not pretty. It’s also historical since that happens to be something I’m trained and qualified to talk about.

We’re living through a pandemic. You might not like to admit that but the world doesn’t often agree on things so when it does you should sit up and pay attention. It’s not the first and probably won’t be the last. But how does it measure up to pandemics in the past?

Here’s one you probably haven’t heard of, the Naples Plague, unless you happened to watch The Borgias TV show. It killed maybe 200,000 people in Naples alone before sweeping through the rest of Italy and claiming another million or so lives. This was during the 1650’s.

Wait, wait, I got that wrong. That was just the city of Naples. The million or so was the kingdom of Naples. It accounts for over half the population of the kingdom and similar to losses in nearby papal states. It was stopped by extreme quarantine measures and the efforts of a wandering German physician.

And this was only an epidemic, meaning they did manage to stop the spread. In lists measuring how large, how infections, how deadly pandemics and epidemics go, Naples ranks about 16th.

Covid is ranked higher, 8th in fact.

Currently.

So what’s worse than Covid? Well, the Bubonic plague, the Black Death. Everyone’s heard of that one. It’s actually quite treatable these days with modern medicine and anti-biotics. Yay science. It’s had a number of outbreaks through history; again back in Italy, in Persia and the Plague of Justinian. That last one is considered the first plague pandemic, named after the Byzantine Emperor of the time. Not what you want to be remembered for. Lasting from 541 – 549 AD this outbreak of plague accounted for somewhere between 15-100 million people’s deaths. That’s a wide ranging figure because historical records are patchy and people dispute exactly what people died from. Sound familiar? Those figures take that into account, so the 15 is a conservative starting point. 15 million people’s deaths are conservative. Say that again. That was 25% of Europe and Western Asia’s population at the time. Let me put that into modern averages. That’s one person in every modern family household.

This was number three on the list.

After that we have the Spanish flu. You’ve probably heard about this one, it’s been thrown around. In context it’s about as tone deaf and racist as called Covid the Chinese Virus. It killed about 50 million people worldwide. Again, hard numbers are debated and that’s a generally agreed upon average. This was between 1918 and 1920. Post World War One and all the conditions that implies. The flu was a variant of Influenza of the H1N1 family with one major, significant difference. Disease normally kills the weak. The young, the elderly, the already infirm. The Spanish flu triggered a cytokine storm in its hosts. Which meant it aggressively ravaged younger, healthier people. The stronger your immune system the more at risk you were. It spread worldwide in the post-war climate.

The deadliest pandemic, the granddaddy Nurgle if you will, is still the Black Death. You can argue the figures. 70 million. 100 million. 200 million. Somewhere between 30-60% of Europe’s entire population. Over just seven years. There’s a lot historians and the medical community still debate and theorize over the Black Death but at the end of 1353 there were a lot of dead people. The theories didn’t make a lot of difference to them.

Here’s a comparison for something that has been intensively studied and you probably haven’t thought much about unless it specifically affects you. HIV/AIDs. That’s still a thing. It’s very much a thing for the over thirty-five million people is has killed since it started in 1981. That’s only about 800,000 people a year. Only. Covid is more than double that. What? I said Covid is more than twice as deadly as AIDs. And so many more times more infectious. You can’t catch AIDs just because someone breathed on you. But you’re much more likely to die from AIDS than you are much the Hollywood-hyped Ebola virus, which killed over fifty people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in an outbreak last year. Two years ago that would have been a clickbait headline. Now it’s barely a footnote.

By contrast Covid has killed somewhere upwards of four million people worldwide, since 2019. That’s the conservative number, taking into account excess reported mortality, which is a talking point. Upwards estimates put it at more than 9 million. Let’s go with the conservatives for once because how often do they get it wrong? That’s in just under two years. Only 0.06% of the population. That’s with the entire world going into lockdown and using every possible modern medical tool at our disposal and throwing every bit of research into developing a host of vaccines in record time. No, they weren’t rushed. Sit down, you don’t know what you’re talking about. So believe it or not, Covid19 as it stands is actually somewhere in the best case scenario, it could have been so much worse. It’s only ranked #8 on the worst pandemics of all time.

Except it’s not over, is it? It’s still going and shows no signs of going away and there’s new variants showing up. So those numbers are going to keep climbing and Covid’s place on the chart will too.

To anyone who ever said do your own research, I just did. How do you like them pandemics?