Plague is an ancient scourge, and fear of the plague is buried deep in our unconscious. The Black Death caused over 100 million deaths in the 14 th century, six centuries before the advent of antibiotics. Compare that to 50 to 100 million deaths from the Spanish flu in 1918 or over 15 million deaths from COVID. On top of severe illness and death, these devastating pandemics have caused worldwide fear and panic.
Flash forward six years from the origins of COVID, and once again we learn of a mysterious pneumonia death of a scientist, this time a laboratory worker, Darya Shipilova, who was working in a lab in Siberia that has been studying dangerous pathogens, including the plague.
Once again, as with COVID, there are far more questions than answers. Is the pathogen pneumonic plague? The Russians deny it. Has it been bioengineered to make it more resistant to antibiotics and more easily transmissible through the air? The Russian health authorities deny it. Have hundreds of patients been isolated and several hospitals been shut down out of an abundance of caution, as the health authorities there would have you believe, or is this something far worse, as it was during the initial Wuhan lockdown for COVID? Russia is now saying that it is winding down precautionary measures, but why were these extensive measures necessary in the first place?
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We may never have the answers to any of these questions, but unfortunately, they not only bring back bad memories of COVID, but they also unmask a continuing lack of a comprehensive global health surveillance network to protect us. The assertions and gesticulations by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at press conferences are no more reassuring now than they were back then.
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The treatment for these scourges, both ancient and modern, for both fear and the actual disease, as I write in my new book, " The Angels Among Us ," is messengers from God to reassure us, treat us, and guide us through, just as Dr. Stephen Kornfeld recently did on the hantavirus ship, the MV Hondius, when another scary disease, the Andes strain of hantavirus , emerged.
In fact, fear of an unknown pathogen sparking a global pandemic was the motivation for an international call for a global network of scientists to protect us more than two decades ago. Unfortunately, that so-called network failed miserably with COVID, as China’s smokescreen was famously amplified by the WHO’s declaration in January 2020 that this was only a regional problem.
COVID whistleblower ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who died in a Wuhan hospital from COVID in February 2020 after a middle-of-the-night visit from the police to shut him down, is buried deep in the public consciousness. So, too, are all our friends and patients who died unceremoniously in the first several months of the pandemic.
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One who didn’t die, as described in "The Angels Among Us," was Evie Rodriguez, who was saved not by medicines but by prayer. She was in the ICU at UC Davis, not responding to steroids or a new antiviral treatment (remdesivir), but rather than be overcome by fear, she turned to prayer and was visited by angels sent to her by her father, Pastor Sam Rodriguez.
This gave her the strength she needed to fight off the angel of death. "I am fully awake, and a dark spirit with an open mouth comes into the room, and I can feel that it has come for me. To take me. It is very heavy and real, a dark force. I feel it is the spirit of death. I am not afraid. I become angry and demand it to leave. ‘What are you doing here?’ I yell. ‘Get away!’ And it goes away. I will it away."
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The difference between 2020 and 2026 may be that the pathogen now, if it is plague, is potentially not very contagious, antibiotics can treat it, and there is already a vaccine that can be used against it, presuming it hasn’t been altered. So the risk beyond that initial case would appear to be very, very small.
But the fear and the global vulnerability remain. Laboratory accidents occur all the time. And we are not prepared for them, especially when it comes to dangerous pathogens from dangerous places. And there is an even more powerful pathogen spreading through our population than disease — fear.
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