It seems unlikely that politicians currently becoming sick with COVID-19 are unaware of it's existence, hardly silent.
The House Member from my district was one of the first to come down with COVID-19. But it's unlikely that even politicians back then were unaware of its existence. We have since learned that most world leaders were briefed by their intelligence services about the virus. There is evidence that those in the U.S. who received those briefings took steps to benefit from the likely economic effect. I don't know if there is evidence that information was leaked to non-government business leaders or other privileged members of society. But on that other hand, one of the first fatalities from COVID-19 in my city was a well-beloved business leader, one of the old school who treated his employees and colleagues well and spent his wealth largely on philanthropy.
But to claim that nCov-19 was just as much a surprise to government leaders as it was to the general population is simply not at all supported by evidence. Now the U.S. is perhaps an example of what can happen when that information is ignored or misused. But that's a different proposition than being taken by surprise. That U.S. leaders may have acted stupidly on the knowledge they received is not the same as their not having been forewarned.
I don't see any mention of a virus in your excerpt, except tangentially in mentioning the flu.
But he also cites the Black Death in the same capacity. Bubonic plague was caused by an ancestor of the modern bacterium
Yersinia pestis. Then he goes on to mention fungal infection. The only thing he's left out is a histaminic response. No, he doesn't get to claim specificity when the net he cast was broad and the claim is based on an indirect
post hoc inference.
You wrote about a pathogen allowing other illnesses to take hold. You say nothing specific about those other illnesses.
You imply that this immune suppressing pathogen is the pandemic. There is nothing in what you wrote that could be interpreted to refer to current COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, this is a fairly obvious attempt to rearrange a minestrone of barely-coherent epidemiology claims to fit the present set of facts.
First, there is a difference between a pathogen having an immuno-suppressant effect and a pathogen that simply overwhelms the immune system. Most patients in any context do not have just one thing. Many of the fatalities from the Spanish flu were said to have died from pneumonia not because the H1N1 virus had an immuno-suppressant effect, but because a simultaneous infection of H1N1 and any of the various bacteria strains that cause pneumonia were together more than the human immune system could fight, whereas either one alone could be sustained. Nowadays we have pharmaceuticals that are effective against pneumonia. freeing up the immune system capacity to fight an opportunistic virus. What is happening now with COVID-19 and opportunistic pathogens, especially among the elderly, is not the effect PartSkeptic alludes to. The elderly have an immune response degraded by any number of age-related factors. The degradation is not a symptom of nCov-19 infection.
What he is alluding to, however, is the typical result of HIV infection (a virus). Those infected often contract AIDS, which does have an immuno-suppressant effect because the mechanism of disease attacks the cells responsible for providing the immune response itself. This is different than simply overwhelming them with more pathogens than they can defend against. AIDS itself is not fatal. But it gradually reduces the immune capacity such that subsequent pathogens that the immune system otherwise would easily be able to fend off instead have more profound -- and ultimately fatal -- effect. This is not because the immune system is overwhelmed by the number and variety of pathogens it's fighting, but because the immune system itself gradually disappears. Those opportunistic infections are generally labeled as complications from AIDS. Many are fungal. A very few fungi are known to exhibit a mechanism by which they attempt to disable the immune system (as opposed to merely deluging it with work), but they are rare. And they are of concern only in patients with an already compromised immune system.
A layman trying to predict a future pandemic in the 1990s might reasonably suppose it would look a lot like the AIDS epidemic. But that would discount how truly atypical the mechanism of AIDS epidemiology really is. Putting it in the same category as epidemics from antiquity is naive. The COVID-19 pandemic is more like those from antiquity, and has nothing to do with the AIDS-like pandemic PartSkeptic was evidently trying to "prophesy" would occur. Further, he gets the mechanism backwards. Citing the fungal pathogen as the immuno-suppressant for something else like a virus is not what happened. It was in fact the other way around.
No matter how hard he wants to wave his hands, he cannot turn electromagnetic field energy into a pathogen. Those are simply entirely different things.
And he's also trying to equivocate on causal mechanism. He predicted that a pathogen would suppress the immune system, paving the way for the effects of some other pandemic. Now he's trying to walk that back to mean just "another factor."
At best, now, he's suggesting it's a direct physiological effect, and the pseudo-science he has cited to support that claim can support nothing beyond that. Further, the specific effects claimed in the material he cites have little if anything to do with the immune system. Sudden-onset headeaches are not a symptom
per se of a suppressed immune system. The claim then has to be that exposure to electromagnetic field energy has suppressed his immune system to the point where some other illness is now allowed to cause him headaches he would not otherwise have.
(How this relates to COVID-19 is unclear. I suppose he's claiming EM radiation affects people in a way that would suppress their response to COVID-19 in the same way it's allegedly suppressing his response to illnesses he has. He straight-up claimed that EM radiation aggravates all illness. When I asked the basis for that, he said it was a fact based on "his experience" and refused to discuss the matter further.)
The problem is that we observe the human immune system -- and specifically the suppression of it -- not to be a hear-today-gone-tomorrow phenomenon. In other words, the headaches wouldn't correlate to emergence of the cause originally proposed to have compromised his immune system in the first place. Immune systems don't come and go on 15-minute schedules. That is something we can reasonably expect from a direct physiological effect, though. And everything we've discussed recently indicates he's alleging only a physiological effect, not a supernatural effect or a pathological effect. Since he provides no detailed mechanism of causation for EM radiation, aside from the material he's already provided that allege unrelated effects (e.g., cancer), we have little basis to judge the claim that EM radiation aggravates all illness.
The null hypothesis in that case would be that the effect doesn't transcend merely the sum of both apparent effects suffered together. That is, suffering from COVID-19 would produce one set of symptoms. And suffering the effects of having one's foot set on fire would produce a different set of symptoms. Suffering both together would be unpleasant, but not necessary because they convolve to make the sum of effects greater than simply the sum of each individually. Falsifying the null in this case would have to demonstrate an effect greater than simply the displeasure of a burning foot taken together with the displeasure of respiratory distress but alleging no causal combination.
How could that be done? Hypothetically having one's foot badly burned might lead to its becoming infected, given the patient's immune system two infections to overcome. This might prove ultimately more fatal in the long run. But this is the sort of mechanism that must be specifically proposed and tested for. In this case the common element is the immune system, and the quantitative effects of either and both together can be measured The chi-square test for significance gives us that answer. But even then it certainly doesn't qualify as proving an effect on "all illnesses," some of which have nothing to do with the immune system.
The point remains that no mechanism, testable or otherwise, has been proposed. And no mechanism arises either from immunology or physiology that his critics can imagine he must means. On this point he's merely hung his hat on the vague argument that since no one can prove some other thing must be causing his headaches, no expert judgment can refute his proffered claim that some mysterious emerging phenomenon is at work.
No, we have to call this a hard miss. He got the basic genus of aggravating factor wrong: electromagnetic energy when a biological pathogen was predicted. He got the mechanism of causation wrrong: physiological causation instead of an immunological causation. And the original prediction relies upon a known aggravation: suppressing the immune system makes one more susceptible to infection. In contrast, his allegations regarding the fact require an effect he merely speculates exists. I submit he speculates its existence to make the facts seem more like they fit his prediction.
And no, widening the goalposts to include both is not an option, because the larger issue is whether PartSkeptic can be considered a real prophet. We have to base our assessment of "close enough" not just on the likeness of what he predicted to what he observed, but also on the likeness of it toward other possible explanations. In that context, as I mentioned earlier, the similarity of the specific elements of the predicted pandemic to the specific elements of one that had already occurred is salient. We have to consider that the elements were specified on purpose, likely in the hopes that a follow-on pandemic would resemble a past one in sufficient detail to make it seem like the "prophet" got the details right. Thus getting them wrong is not an option. We don't allow the situation where details gotten right indicate success, but details gotten wrong is merely neutral.
And we must consider the likely behavior of someone trying to pretend to be a prophet. We suspect a pseudo-prophet will add detail, knowing that detail is more convincing. We would expect a pseudo-prophet, probably being a layman, will have a limited understanding of what values those details can take on. We would expect a pseudo-prophet to follow the general principle that things to come will resemble history. Except it's a tell-tale in this case. "History," in the case of epidemiology, contains a fairly notable bump in the road that isn't likely to repeat. If a pseudo-prophet mistakenly used that exceptional case as if it were typical, or even expected again any time in history, he'd reveal that this was the process he used to "prophesy."
