Once-in-a-Century Pandemic?

Post #799

NOTE: The following post is a complement to a prior post on a similar topic.

Back on 28 Feb 2020, Bill Gates published an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine about how the coronavirus “pandemic” (WHO referred to it as only an “outbreak” before March 2020) means that it’d be good if billions of dollars get spent on coronavirus “vaccines” and if only 90 days are required for FDA approvals:

“The goal of this work should be to get conclusive clinical trial results and regulatory approval in 3 months or less, without compromising patients’ safety.

Then there’s the question of funding. Budgets for these efforts need to be expanded several times over. Billions more dollars are needed to complete phase 3 trials and secure regulatory approval for coronavirus vaccines, and still more funding will be needed to improve disease surveillance and response.”

But we can look back into our historic looking-glass to discover what was known at the time, just to verify that those billions of dollars and those regulatory short-cuts would be justified by a world-threatening disease. With influenza worldwide, the average daily infection rate is almost 3 million flu infections per day (a billion a year):

But when Gates published the Pandemic Paper, this was the world situation:

The total daily cases outside of China had not even reached 1,000 per day when Gates published. But cases aren’t really important unless they lead to morbidity and mortality. When Gates published, the morbidity and mortality in the world was looking good:

While influenza can lead to worldwide weekly death counts of 14,000 per week, COVID wasn’t leading to death counts that were anywhere near the flu. The world’s worst week of COVID death — by the time that Gates published — was 861, in the week ending on 22 Feb 2020.

With extrapolation from averages, flu killed over 10 times as many people in that week.

Here is the accumulation by the first week of March:

The world total death count by 7 Mar 2020 was 50,000 below expectations, indicating that there were no reliable “ground data” which would reasonably lead someone to write an essay about a pandemic supposedly so severe that one like it only comes around once every century.

The Gates essay was guilty of putting the cart before the horse.

Reference

Gates B. Responding to Covid-19 - A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic? N Engl J Med. 2020 Apr 30;382(18):1677-1679. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2003762. Epub 2020 Feb 28. PMID: 32109012. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp2003762

WHO Situation Report No. 39. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200228-sitrep-39-covid-19.pdf