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“Fake Covid-19 Pandemic:” Refuting the Conspiracy Theory Gone Global

Photograph Source: NIAID – CC BY 2.0

The idea of a ‘fake pandemic to create economic chaos’ is not just an ‘extreme Right’ cry of militant anti-staters, libertarians, Trump rallies and malcontents. It is proclaimed from the Left by a world-renowned critical economist and the usually ahead-of the curve website of which he is founding editor – now called Global Research News.

I responded with concern to the suspect claims being made on the site. “The extreme right are running the anti-Covid-19 movement from the start so far as I have seen”, I wrote my admired colleagued Michel Chossudovsky, “and GR appears to join them from the left, especially since its expertise too does not come from infectious disease knowledge”.

I then wrote the text of the following communication to follow up his call for ‘a debate’ on the issue. Since the logical fallacies at the heart of the ‘fake pandemic’ argument contribute to the deaths mounting from dismissal of pre-cautionary practises against its virulent spread, it is a life-and-death matter to expose their invalidity.

Isolation of the False Conclusions

All well-informed people can agree on these facts of the Covid-19 crisis. The leading corporate rich have vastly profited from it, and the most vulnerable populations in the tens of millions have been stripped of their very livelihoods and prospects of secure life. This is the nature of the ruling disorder – to capitalize on any crisis to deepen its bleeding of the public even more than before. It happens again and again, as ‘shock doctrine’ has long recognized.

Certainly a Covid-19 Excess Profits Tax should be imposed to help pay for its astronomical costs. Canada’s New Democratic Party is already rightfully demanding this.

Yet the facts of system-wide exploitation of the Covid-19 crisis do not show that the disease itself is fraudulent. No public infectious disease expert anywhere in the world substantiates it. It is a fatal as well as fallacious claim because its consequence is to repudiate the only preventative measures that are known to work against the disease that disables, hospitalizes and kills ever more vulnerable people. More deeply, the Covid-19 deaths themselves – now more than 213,000 in the US leading the world and still climbing – are in effect denied.

The Core of the Fake Pandemic Argument

The argument Michel Chossudovsky presents – simplified in his terms – is that Covid-19 is a “fake pandemic to create economic chaos”. Yet this amply documented case only shows the spiked disastrous effects of the capitalist disorder for the poorer majority of the world, and payoffs and power for the elites. All can agree on these consequences. But this does not provide evidence of a ‘fake pandemic.’

Only one infectious-disease fact is provided from which to infer this conclusion – namely, that “the standard PCR Test applied in relation to Covid-19 does not detect or identify the virus. What it detects are fragments of several viruses”. This fact also cores the argument for the ‘fake virus’ elsewhere.

We can all accept this fact, too. The research knowledge is clear that there is ‘no gold standard’ test for the new Covid-19 Virus, including the PCR (polymerase chain reaction testing). The most advanced infectious-disease knowledge seems to be that if “PCR and anti-body tests are combined at point of care, their reliability can be hugely increased.”

Yet to conclude from the inadequacy of the PCR that ‘Covid-19 is a ‘fake pandemic’ is a deadly non-sequitur. Just because this test for the disease is so far inadequate alone does not remotely mean the widely fatal disease does not exist.

Understanding Cause and Effect

What is fatally overlooked are the most basic facts of far more deaths than in previous years from viruses, only one of which viruses is new – Covid 19. This excess death rate in the US is graphed over five weeks from the beginning.

When there is abnormal and very significant deviation of deaths from the seasonal average, a cause is properly sought. If we define cause as a non-redundant member of a set of jointly sufficient conditions, the non-redundant or norm-deviant cause is Covid 19.

Whether or not the tests detect it accurately does not change the fact that there are tens of thousands excess deaths occurring in varying exponential rates across the world unless social prevention reduces or eliminates them.

Moreover, no other causal hypothesis for all these excess deaths has been defined. Nor has any explanation of why societies following or not following the prevention techniques correspondingly reduce or increase this abnormal death rate.

All of this relevant reality is left or selected out of the ‘fake pandemic argument’ – the tell-tale operation of propaganda. In further established fact, the death-rate declines or rises in correlation to social masks, hygiene and distancing or not. Yes ‘economic chaos’ can result from interventions such as ‘economic lockdown’ to ensure against disease transmission. This lockdown method itself is certainly open to question, and less total and socially targeted methods like Sweden’s may work better in the end. The evidence is still unfolding. But nowhere has it been shown that Covid-19 is a ‘fake disease’, nor does this claim logically follow from any evidence that exists.

Community Solidarity in Response Alone Works

One can completely agree with the gross system injustice of all. It remorselessly selects for the ruin of millions of lives of the poorer majority. But despite this ‘covid-19 injustice’ virulently harming the least most, rises and falls of the excess death rate nonetheless follow in accordance with social response to the virus as real, not fake. For example, the death in Canada has been 1/20th that of the US per capita, and the Northern Saskatchewan Cree 1/4th of that, and Cuba more effective – all of them treating Covid-19 as real and deadly if not stopped in transmission.

Community solidarity in ensuring cooperation in the rules of masking, distancing and quarantine is the common feature of lives being saved rather than lost across the world – including societies not run by the corporate rich profiting from the pandemic.

None of this is explained by the hypothesis of a ‘fake pandemic to create economic chaos’. It refutes it. In simple logical terms. the counter-hypothesis of a ‘fake pandemic to create economic chaos’ does not follow from the facts, even those selected by the argument itself.

The Logic of Scientific Method

Any hypothesis is scientific only if there is evidence that can count against it (the falsifiability criterion). What evidence can count against this hypothesis of ‘fake pandemic’ to show it is not a closed circle?

None has been presented anywhere.

The unseen consequences of the ‘fake epidemic’ claim being believed and the known ways to stop it being dismissed are that the excess death toll keeps rising with the vulnerable suffering and dying most.

In one sentence: The false conspiracy theory proclaimed right and left as ‘freedom from the deep state’ drives the very death and suffering spiral it claims to stand against.