Who Do You Trust If You Can't Trust the Science? — Mythbusting Whether Flu Was Rebranded as Covid
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
"How do we know that the flu hasn't just been rebranded as Covid?"
Quite a few people have suggested this controversial explanation for the pandemic, highlighting that the flu disappeared just as Covid arrived. They also pointed to massive problems with PCR tests and raised concerns about the trustworthiness of the SARS-CoV-2 gene sequence. Since our health officials have been playing fast and loose with the truth on just about everything else, and with so many other conspiracy theories turning out to be partially or even entirely true (remember when vaccine passports were called a conspiracy theory?), why not that too?
The problem with trying to answer this question is that PCR testing is so technically complicated that most of us are unable to independently judge whether PCR tests are merely picking up fragments of influenza DNA that share similarities with portions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And most of us do not have the technical expertise to judge for ourselves whether the SARS-CoV-2 genome has truly been isolated and fully sequenced, or whether the published gene sequence used during PCR testing is actually just a virtual computer-generated imposter.
In light of our own limited technical expertise, should we track down knowledgeable experts and rely on them to tell us the answer? In other words, should we "trust the scientists", as so many politicians and public health officials like to tell us at every opportunity? As we've seen in comical detail over the past two years, the problem with this approach is that if you put 10 experts in a room, you're likely to get 11 opinions. Which one should we trust?
The easiest solution (and the one that works best when science isn't the political gong show that it has become today) would be to round up a bunch of disagreeing experts and put them through the gauntlet of debate so we can hear them defend their evidence and test each other's claims, similar to what happens in a courtroom hearing. As long as everyone has the right to speak freely, truth has a way of bubbling to the surface as the evidence gradually eats away at incorrect ideas.
“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” ~ Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes #Commissions Earned.
But we immediately run into the same problem as before. Most of us don't even have the technical expertise to weigh their evidence during a debate; we have to take them at their word and decide whose word to take if they disagree. With something as technically complicated as a PCR test, we actually need other experts to be their judge. So, we're right back to the same dilemma: which expert or panel of experts should we appoint to judge the experts? The stamp of "expertise" is worth very little these days; did you listen to the clown show in the US Supreme Court recently as the most illustrious minds in the land demonstrated their towering ignorance during their legal evaluation of vaccine mandates? Without being able to judge the evidence for ourselves, we're just blindly putting our chips on our favorite horse, i.e. the one most likely to reinforce our own biases. Science doesn't work based on expert opinion. It requires hard evidence that we can judge for ourselves.
Or perhaps we should defer to whoever has the best credentials? My expert has three degrees, yours only has two. And my expert has published more papers even though your expert is more widely cited. Does a Harvard degree trump a degree from Stanford? Does a virologist's opinion trump an immunologist's opinion? What happens if a microbiologist disagrees with them both? And how much is the opinion of an expert worth after he has retired from his career? Besides, I'm pretty sure your expert, despite his once illustrious credentials, is now spreading misinformation since he disagrees with what I consider "obvious" facts. And your other expert should be categorically deplatformed from polite society because she's a racist; you shouldn't look at her research because Twitter archaeologists uncovered that, back in her freshman year in college, she once drunk-tweeted something nasty about the green Martians that live on Alpha Centauri.
If we allow ourselves to rank expertise based on credentials, we are no better than the politicians and media who defer to whichever experts agree with their opinions, while finding ways to cancel those who don't. That's not science, that's cherry-picking institutional medals of achievement to rubberstamp our biases. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
We must never forget that Einstein was merely a clerk at a patent office while he developed his theories. Credentials are for job applications, not for evidence-based debate.
Or maybe we should get the experts to take a vote? That seems like a nice, fair, and democratic solution... but who decides which experts get to vote? What if they are all wrong even if they all agree? What if the dissenters who got it right have long since quit academia in disgust because of the harassment, funding cuts, and career-limiting consequences of holding politically unpopular opinions? Would Einstein get a vote in 1916 while still working at the patent office? Would Einstein's vote have counted in 1933 Germany on the eve of his emigration to the USA?
Consensus is irrelevant to truth. Science is the most undemocratic process in the universe — and it has to stay that way if you want science to function as a tool for uncovering truths. There is a wonderful story about how Einstein was shown a German newspaper that claimed, "One hundred physicists claim Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong." Einstein supposedly replied, "If I were wrong, it would only take one."
If you're wondering whether the only reliable solution to the Covid riddle is to become a PCR expert yourself, don't worry, there is a much simpler solution. Scientific questions don't exist in a vacuum. Another way to weigh evidence is to look at what kind of predictions can be made if one thing or another is true. A claim that challenges a narrative has to fit into the big picture, and that means we can look at what other dominoes are knocked over if a claim were to turn out to be true. It's how both experts and non-experts can test someone else's claims. At its heart, that's what it means to "do science."
For example, very few have the expertise, even today, to judge whether Einstein's theory of relativity was right. And yet, there are simple tests that allow us to try to disprove his theory. One such test happened in 1971 when four atomic clocks were placed on airplanes that flew around the world to test whether time was relative (as predicted by Einstein) or absolute (as was the consensus belief before Einstein came along). Einstein's theory of relativity predicted that the faster you move, the slower time passes. So, if the clocks traveling at high speed had come back showing the exact same passage of time as those remaining stationary on the ground, Einstein's entire theory would have been proven wrong. But Einstein's theory passed the test. The traveling clocks came back showing a different time than those on the ground, and the amount of difference (measured in nanoseconds) was consistent with Einstein's predictions. Everyone, regardless of their level of expertise could judge the results of Einstein's predictions for themselves.
If Covid is merely a rebranded flu, we can test this claim by looking at all the knock-on consequences to see if a flu virus could cause all the things that we see going on around us. So, let's put the "Covid is just the flu" idea to the test.
Ordinary Versus Extraordinary Evidence.
An ordinary claim requiring ordinary evidence is that PCR tests are unreliable and produce a massive number of false positives. Even without getting into cycle thresholds and all the other technical issues with PCR reliability, let's take our cue from Tanzania's late president who pretty much single-handedly put a dagger through the heart of PCR reliability when he tested a papaya and a goat, and both came back positive. I wouldn't want to trust my healthcare to many of the other beliefs he held, but boy oh boy did he nail that takedown. He showed that one important cog in the global Covid narrative was demonstrably very very rotten. But it's an ordinary claim because it doesn't automatically mean that the rest of the puzzle is rotten too.
However, a more explicit claim, with far reaching consequences, is that Covid PCR tests are misidentifying gene fragments of the flu. Evidence of unreliable PCR test results are, by themselves, not proof that the SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn't exist; that's going too far with such a small piece of evidence. To draw such a sweeping conclusion requires much more robust and comprehensive evidence, and requires finding a logical and consistent — and testable — explanation for all the other loose ends that pop up if Covid is merely a rebranded flu, such as the results of antibody tests, the disappearance of colds and RSV viruses, different clinical symptoms and different virus behaviours, and evidence (or lack thereof) of cover-ups among lab technicians and other scientists who would have to do the dirty work of rebranding flu as Covid. No matter how plausible an explanation sounds, it requires hard evidence to separate it from speculation.
So, given the number of knock-on effects that would have to be true, there is a very high burden of proof required to sustain the claim that Covid is merely a rebranded flu. In short, it is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinarily broad and comprehensive evidence.
Two Competing Explanations for the Pandemic
So, we have two separate and testable competing hypotheses:
Hypothesis #1: SARS-CoV-2 is a new coronavirus strain, arriving in late 2019/early 2020, which displaced the flu, and which is being massively overhyped and exploited by many people, but which is a real virus nonetheless.
Hypothesis #2: The existing seasonal flu was simply rebranded as a fictional SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus thanks to flawed PCR testing and flawed gene sequencing, thus creating an entirely manufactured crisis from top to bottom.
Let's consider some of the loose ends that must be addressed in order to make a case for hypothesis #2:
Differences in clinical symptoms between SARS-CoV-2 and influenza
Some of the clinical symptoms of severe Covid are radically different from those found in patients with severe flu (i.e. longer virus incubation period, oxygen depletion that was not fixable with intubation (silent hypoxia), and so on). These measurable differences in clinical symptoms are direct evidence that whatever is circulating in society is affecting patients in a way that is different from how influenza affects patients. But is that evidence reliable?
Some early claims made by public health officials, doctors, hospital staff, and Covid activists did turn out to be nothing but hysteria. For example, here's a link to pandemic expert Yaneer Bar-Yam claiming that 50% of people with COVID will have the type of heart damage where the heart "tears itself with every beat." That claim was dead wrong. Similarily, many of the claims about "Long Covid" are also now in doubt.
Many people with stellar credentials, including those on the front lines, saw what they believed (confirmation bias) and allowed their emotions to cloud their rational and objective observations. Fear is a blinding emotion. But many other differences in clinical symptoms turned out to be real. For example, during a regular viral pneumonia triggered by a severe flu, patients can get starved for breath because of goop building up in their airways, in which case a tube is inserted into the airways to make breathing easier. Many severe Covid patients were also starving for oxygen. But the cause was different. It wasn't a question of getting more air to the lungs, the problem was that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was interfering with the red blood cells' ability to absorb oxygen. All the intubation in the world didn't help. In fact, the traumatic damage caused by ramming a tube down their airways only made matters worse. Treating Covid like it was the flu didn't work because severe COVID-19 is not a viral pneumonia, but a post-viral autoimmune attack on the lung. What patients needed instead was an oxygen mask with very high oxygen levels to overcome the red blood cells' virus-induced resistance to absorbing oxygen.
Hospitals and public health officials initially refused to acknowledge this difference, and therefore directly caused many preventable deaths both by withholding oxygen and by the traumatic injuries to the airways caused by intubation. When a small number of brave frontline doctors began speaking out to try to stop this mistake, many hospitals and public health officials even went as far as censoring them and reassigning them to non-Covid duties. Dissenters faced an extremely hostile gauntlet in order to demonstrate that Covid does not behave like flu, yet in time their evidence prevailed nonetheless.
Like Einstein's traveling clocks, the reduction in deaths that happened after intubation was stopped speaks for itself. It was one of the first successful challenges of early mainstream beliefs about the pandemic (and a warning of the level of hysterical denial of objective evidence that was to come). Beliefs have overshadowed objective observations at every stage of this crisis. The intubation example highlights how differently Covid behaves from influenza. Covid is something different. That doesn't automatically prove the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but it does prove that whatever causes Covid disease is not regular seasonal influenza.
If Covid is merely a rebranded flu, should we go back to intubation, in line with the regular protocol used to treat viral pneumonia caused by influenza? Those claiming Covid is the flu must provide transparent evidence to make their case — at this point the burden of proof rests on their shoulders to demonstrate that this is just a regular influenza virus with a new label.
Another loose end: Differences in how the innate immune system responds:
Clinical research has also shown that during an infection with Covid, patients had "unique hyperinflammatory signatures across all types of immune cells, particularly the upregulation of TNF- and IL-1-driven inflammatory responses, whereas IFN-I and IFN-II (IFNγ) responses were predominant in patients with severe influenza". This is direct measurable evidence that the immune system behaves differently in response to an infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus compared to how it behaves during an influenza infection.
Just because a study is peer reviewed and gets published doesn't automatically mean it is right. It may be partially or wholly wrong, or sometimes even deliberately fraudulent. There have been plenty of garbage studies published during Covid, such as the fraudulent and now retracted Surgisphere study discrediting hydroxychloroquine or the misdesigned and potentially criminal WHO trials, which administered lethal doses of hydroxychloroquine in the late-stage of the disease even though this was never how frontline doctors suggested hydroxychloroquine should be used — frontline doctors were only having success using it in low doses, only when administered in the very early stages of the disease or when used as a prophylaxis, and only as a cocktail mixed with multiple other drugs and therapeutics (i.e. zinc).
Flawed scientific studies are an all too common problem caused by rampant confirmation bias; sloppy methodology; poor grasp of statistics; conflicts of interest; fear of repercussions if results challenge popular or highly politicized narratives; catering to the beliefs of funding agencies, administrators, or corporate donors in order to secure research grants; and so on.
And flawed studies are not easy to spot. Consider, for example, that for 47 years dietary cholesterol was "scientifically proven" to increase blood cholesterol and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Then, in 2015, the USA removed the recommendation for restricting dietary cholesterol because it turned out the evidence did not support that recommendation. A 47-year bedrock of scientific beliefs came crumbling down because other scientists refused to blindly accept decades worth of "settled science", kept asking more questions, and kept probing the data.
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| Cholesterol in food not a concern new report says. CNN Health, February 19th, 2015 |
In the current dysfunctional climate of our broken scientific institutions, up to half of all studies are flat out wrong — their results cannot be replicated if the study is repeated. And it's been a problem for a very long time, long before Covid hit. In 2005, PLOS Medicine published a famous essay by biostatistician Dr. John Ioannidis in which he pointed out that "most research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields" and that "claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of prevailing bias." If his name sounds familiar, it is because in 2020 Dr. Ioannidis re-emerged as one of the earliest and most clear-sighted critics of Covid hysteria (I discussed his courageous early challenges of the alarmist mainstream narrative during the introduction of my book, Autopsy of a Pandemic #Commissions Earned).
One of the checks and balances on rampant bad scientific research is to continuously assess how new ideas fit into the framework of the bigger picture. A new piece of information may seem perfectly reasonable and well-documented, but the domino effect of its implications gives you another way to test its validity. When multiple lines of seemingly rock-solid evidence contradict one another, that's a good sign that something is wrong, even if you don't yet know why. Whenever a thread seems out of place, it's time to pull on that thread until you can figure out what exactly is going on.
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” ― Richard P. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.
So, back to the task at hand. Despite the ever-present risk of flawed studies, we are already starting to see multiple lines of corroborative evidence from entirely different directions and different fields, which are undermining the claim that Covid is merely a rebranded flu. And, more tellingly, these separate threads of evidence do not contradict each other. On the contrary, they compliment each other by telling the same story from different perspectives, which gives us extra confidence that these differences between Covid and influenza are real. The sum of evidence is stacking up against hypothesis #2 while stacking up in support of hypothesis #1.
Despite clear evidence that our public health officials are pumping out rampant propaganda and presenting data out of context to manipulate public behaviour, and despite potentially criminal misconduct by the WHO in the case of the hydroxychloroquine trial (perhaps to discredit a therapeutic that might undermine the legal basis for granting emergency use authorization to the vaccines), there is an absence of evidence that frontline doctors and medical researchers blatantly faked low oxygen absorption of red blood cells, invented fake immunological responses, and so on.
Either these clinical symptoms and immunological differences are real or there would need to be a massive coordinated conspiracy of frontline doctors and lab researchers faking this stuff - the public health officials wouldn't be able to pull that off on their own. To paraphrase Einstein, all it would take to expose that kind of active fraud would be to measure the inflammatory signatures in immune cells, show intubation works, and run tests to show that red blood cells are not losing their ability to absorb oxygen during a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Those claiming that Covid is merely a rebranded influenza virus have to overcome this hurdle to make their case.
Viral Interference: To Use Star Wars Terminology, There Has Been a Disturbance in the Force
Another strike against hypothesis #2 is that there is clear evidence for a very large disturbance in the seasonal respiratory virus schedule. The flu, RSV virus, rhinoviruses, and all the other viruses that normally cause colds and flus all but disappeared at virtually the same time that Covid arrived on scene.
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| The disappearance of the flu (adapted from WHO FluNet) |
Many have pointed to this disappearing act as circumstantial evidence for a rebranding of the flu. Yet testing for flu, RSV, and other respiratory viruses continued even as Covid arrived on scene — they stopped finding flu, RSV, and other normal seasonal respiratory viruses despite the fact that the number of tests for these other viruses continued at similar or even higher levels compared to previous years. And flu also disappeared in countries with little or no Covid in the early months of the pandemic, like in Japan, providing additional confirmation that something unusual was interfering with the global transmission cycle of influenza.
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| Number of influenza tests (left side) vs percent of tests coming up positive (right side) in Canada, the USA, and in Europe. During the 2020/21 season, the flu simply disappeared despite more testing than usual. From The National Influenza Annual Report, Canada, 2020-2021, published October 2021 |
As further confirmation of the negative flu testing results, we also have countless anecdotal stories from people all around the world commenting about the absence of normal colds and flus over the past 22 months — a repurposed flu cannot do this, normal colds and flus should have continued. This is circumstantial real-world confirmation of what flu testing has shown: something displaced normal cold and flu season.
Skeptical critics might say, "Ah, but look at all the Covid numbers - flu cases and flu deaths were simply transferred to the Covid columns in a spreadsheet." No. Once you drill a little deeper into the epidemiological data, it quickly becomes apparent that this was not a 1 to 1 replacement.
Covid massively shifted deaths to the elderly population, even more than during a regular flu season. Severe outcomes and even severe symptoms were largely constrained to nursing homes, to infections caught inside hospitals, to the extremely elderly demographic (especially 80+), and to people already suffering from extremely high-risk pre-existing conditions (obesity, diabetes, cancer, etc.). They had a miserable time of it during Covid, more than usual.
But almost everyone else suffered much less than usual, with almost exclusively mild or asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. The coughing, sneezing, and fevers that most people associate with cold and flu season simply didn't happen for most people for almost two years despite the barrage of positive PCR tests that suggested Covid was everywhere. That in itself suggests that whatever this is, it acted very differently than influenza. There has clearly been "a disturbance in the force", which is out of character with a rebranded flu. The footprint of a different beast is clearly visible.
And now the flu is returning, but only in countries that have developed high natural immunity to Covid (i.e. South Africa, Sweden, India, etc), where it is now co-existing with Covid (now there are positive Covid AND positive flu tests), whereas the flu is still missing in countries with low natural immunity to Covid. This strong evidence of viral displacement until a large portion of the population develops natural immunity to the new virus is yet another smoking gun demonstrating that Covid is not the flu. I encourage you to read my recent deep dive into the disappearance (and return) of the flu. It is one of the most important scientific events that has happened over the course of the last two years - it allows us to understand exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus behaves and predicts the future trajectory of the virus.
Different Kinds of Lies
There is another rather large loose end that needs to be tied up by those advocating for hypothesis #2. Since regular flu testing didn't stop, if Covid is merely a rebranded flu, then who faked the negative test results of the millions of flu tests in thousands of labs all around the world over the last two years?
Unlike the treasure trove of emails exposing how public health officials like Dr. Fauci tried to cover up gain-of-function funding and smear experts who were critical of lockdowns, to date no evidence has surfaced to demonstrate that anyone falsified the results of millions of flu tests. And as flu returns to countries with high natural immunity to Covid (but not to countries with low natural immunity to Covid), now we have positive flu tests and positive Covid tests, side by side. If someone was faking negative flu tests before to help fascilitate a grand consipiracy, they certainly are putting the government in an awkward position now by allowing flu tests to resume, because that's an awkward development for a government that insist that masks stop respiratory viruses and that vaccines are better than natural immunity (more on that story in my article called The False God of Central Planning).
There are two kinds of lies: the first kind is what I have consistently reported on during Covid, like in my big investigative report called The Lies Exposed by the Numbers, in which public health officials and media hyped up numbers and presented them out of context, or simply ignored their own official data and made up scary stories. Yet despite the hysterical public messaging, statistics departments all around the world continued to publish decent and consistent data throughout the pandemic. And if you look closely, public health officials and media have (mostly) been very careful not to incriminate themselves by quoting false numbers; they simply presented those numbers out of context while attaching scary unjustified interpretations. Speculative models based on hysterical assumptions about the future were constantly used to distract from cold hard data about what was happening in reality.
This kind of lie only requires a small number of incompetent or corrupt top-level public health officials, a compliant media, scientifically illiterate politicians, and a frightened public. It's confirmation bias on steroids where everyone believes what they hear, sees only things that confirm their beliefs, and views the world through a distorted lens. It's a self-sustaining mass hysteria, created by group think, through the silencing (deplatforming) of dissenting voices, through deliberate and deeply arrogant fear-based "nudge" behavioral manipulation (evidence here), and through corrupt opportunism as people and organizations from every corner of society try to turn the Hysterical New World Order to their advantage.
But to actively falsify millions of flu tests in thousands of labs all around the world is another matter altogether. That would require a massive network of lower-level staff (lab technicians, researchers, and other scientists) to all have signed on to a deliberate treasonous plot (a.k.a. conspiracy) and to be willing to deliberately jeopardise their own careers and risk jail time if caught. It's one thing to scream hysterically at out-of-context numbers. It's quite another for lab technicians to take an eraser and turn a positive flu test into a negative result. There's no get-out-of-jail free card for that if you get caught. That's a completely different kind of lie.
Actively faking flu tests would require a massive network of goons serving some centrally coordinated James Bond villain with very deep pockets to pay bribes and blackmail lab technicians into compliance. Considering the criminal consequences if they get caught faking millions of flu tests, why would they play ball? What benefit to them when they already have lucrative careers? It's a conspiracy that only works as long as no-one squeals. To paraphrase Einstein again, it would only take one squealer to blow the whole plot out of the water. Instead, we have seen many of those very same technicians, researchers, and scientists risk the wrath of top-level public health officials by continuing to publish data that contradicts and exposes the government's predatory public messaging.
The Great Barrington Declaration has signatures from more than 60,000 doctors, researchers, and public health scientists who were critical of the public health response. Most work as part of the system yet are part of our informal dissent movement. If outright data manufacturing was going on in flu tests, clinical symptoms, or immunological studies, we would know about it by now. And in cases when it did happen, we do know and were able to call it out, like the fraudulent and now retracted Surgisphere study discrediting hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment for Covid.
In other words, we do not have evidence for the active data fraud required to support hypothesis #2. Hypothesis #1 is a far more plausible explanation to explain the missing flu results, and just as damning for holding top-level decision makers accountable.
Antibody Tests Are Not PCR Tests
And what about antibody testing for Covid? Covid antibodies are not the same as influenza antibodies. Are the results of antibody tests flawed or faked? Unlike the PCR test, which relies on finding virus DNA fragments, antibody tests (a.k.a. serology tests) look for the chemical signatures of very specific proteins in our blood (antibodies are specialized proteins created by our immune systems). Thus, antibody tests cannot be explained away as an overlap in DNA sequences shared between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and influenza.
But if you are wondering if antibodies against influenza might be mistaken for antibodies against Covid, consider all the early antibody studies that were done around the world after the first wave, with results showing that in many countries less than 1% of their populations were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 during that first wave. Most of us have some previous history with the flu, so those low early Covid antibody numbers are well below what you would see if conducting influenza antibody tests. Once again, the only way to get these results if Covid is a rebranded flu would be if antibody researchers pulled out their erasers and deliberately faked this data.
That's highly unlikely since many antibody tests were conducted by people who were highly critical of the Covid response, such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration) and Dr. John Ioannidis (who you've already met in this article). Their April 2020 antibody study was pivotal in demonstrating that infection was far more widespread than PCR tests would suggest. Their study highlighted just how NOT dangerous Covid was to most people — this was a critical puzzle piece in exposing the hysteria. That antibody study was yet another epic takedown of the government's fear narrative, demonstrating that infection fatality rates during Covid were actually in the same ballpark as a regular bad flu season and skewed towards an even older demographic than usual. I find it impossible to believe that Dr. John Ioannidis is either "controlled opposition" or doesn't know the difference between an influenza antibody and a coronavirus antibody.
As we dig into the bigger picture of what happened during the pandemic, it becomes clear that hypothesis #2 cannot happen by mistake (i.e. accidentally mistaking influenza DNA as Covid). Just because the system is broken does not mean that all scientists are incompetent, corrupt, or evil. Quite the contrary, they are trapped in a broken system and are as much victim of it as we are. In other words, there are simply too many false flag conspiracies and too many layers of goons that would be required to pull off hypothesis #2.
Monoclonal Cross-Reactive Antibodies Against SARS
Another piece of evidence against the "Covid is flu" hypothesis is that monoclonal antibodies, which neutralize the original 2002-2004 SARS virus, also neutralize SARS-CoV-2. This is direct measurable real-world evidence that we are not dealing with an influenza virus, but rather with a new strain of coronavirus that is closely related to the original 2002-2004 SARS-CoV virus. If the pandemic was caused by an influenza virus, monoclonal antibodies against SARS would be ineffective.
Genetics Tests
And what of all the scientists who used genetic tests of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to point out anomalies in furin cleavage sites in the virus' genome? This is part of the basket of genetic evidence being used to expose gain-of-function research (much to the embarrassment of Fauci and friends), to pinpoint virus origins in the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to shared genetic sequences with other documented coronaviruses stored in their lab (i.e. RaTG13), and to try to work out the evolutionary relationship between variants (i.e. which previous variant gave rise to Omicron?). A rebranded flu would disqualify the lab leak, would render gain-of-function debates mute (and let Fauci and friends off the hook), and would mean that the variants are pure computer-generated fiction despite clear differences in their behaviour (i.e. Omicron's mildness compared to earlier strains).
Loose Ends
There are countless other loose ends that we could use to test hypothesis #2 without having to dive into the complex technical details of PCR tests, but I think the case against hypothesis #2 is now ironclad. I have no doubt that the results of PCR tests are a disaster — indeed their unreliability is central to many of the abuses of public trust that have occurred during the pandemic. But anyone trying to make a case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is merely a rebranded flu immediately runs into mountains of counterevidence debunking that claim.
Even as this mountain of evidence stacks up against hypothesis #2, that same mountain of evidence is universally supportive of hypothesis #1. Hypothesis #1 tells a consistent story in which public health officials and politicians massively overhyped a relatively benign but nonetheless new strain of coronavirus that is closely related to the original SARS virus that circulated in 2002 to 2004.
Hypothesis #1 does not mean there isn't rampant opportunism, fraud, or criminal intent going on in the midst of the chaos. And hypothesis #1 doesn't make the authoritarianism growing out of this crisis any less dangerous. But to draw conclusions of a different epic grand conspiracy in which the flu has been accidentally or intentionally rebranded as an entirely invented SARS-CoV-2 virus is not consistent with the sum of the evidence that has surfaced to date. The bigger the rabbit hole, the more robust the evidence must be to support it. And it must not have loose ends. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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"Trusting the science" is not (and never has been) about trusting results or trusting experts. Trusting the scientists is what got us into this mess. For science to function properly, we must NOT trust the scientists. Instead, we must trust in the messy self-correcting process that allows truth to boil to the surface even if every participant in that process is flawed.
— Richard P. Feynman
Science is the relentless competition between measurable pieces of evidence, the ruthless gauntlet of debate, the willingness to question even the most "obvious" of assumptions, and the humbleness to test and retest any and all assumptions against hard evidence, most especially when those assumptions are our own.
There is a silver lining to all this. Covid chaos has pulled back the curtain on what had become a black box. For far too long, science had become something that the public relegated to "experts" and institutions. It had become sanitized infotainment on the Discovery channel — "The Science" serving as a kind of Ministry of Truth that churns out interesting facts, not unlike the revealed wisdom of medieval institutions during the Dark Ages or like the Man Behind the Curtain in the timeless classic, The Wizard of Oz #Commissions Earned.
"Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science." — Dr. Anthony Fauci, June 9th, 2021
Covid is serving as the takedown of an arrogant and broken system that was already collapsing under the weight of groupthink, corruption, political correctness, conflicts of interest, corporate influence, political meddling, and the vulgar competition for funding. But like a phoenix that rises from its own ashes, Covid is also sowing the seeds of the antidote to that broken system by making the public aware of the fact that scientists are as mortal and flawed as everyone else.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness #Commissions Earned
Covid is breaking down the segregated bubbles of laymen versus institutional experts, getting people to talk to others who see the world differently, rekindling the habit of asking questions, renewing the lost art of public scientific debate, and (most importantly of all) inviting every member of society to ask questions and participate in that messy process.
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