Science meets secular mythology—and loses, again

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 27, 2020

My friend Thomas B. Fowler sent me an email the other day, shortly after I called attention to his work in my recent commentary, Science always points to God. Tom was responding to the recent absurd claim by Dr. Anthony Fauci—our chief guide in all things pandemic—that worldwide epidemics are growing worse today because we are not caring properly for the environment. The claim was made in an article published in the journal Cell (the tag line for which is Science that inspires), entitled “Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19”.

But the counter-point is best made by quoting Dr. Fowler directly:

In my book [Science, Faith, and Scientists, not yet available for sale], I talk about the politicization of science and the effects that it has. We now have another example in living color: Dr. Fauci is making the rather absurd claim that pandemics are getting worse because—you guessed it—we’re trashing the planet.

The only problem is that he commits intellectual fraud on a grand scale in an attempt to make this plausible. Fauci claims 50 million deaths from the Bubonic Plague of the 14th century. He didn’t even get that right, let alone adjust for population. The real number is about 136 million, and adjusted for population, in today’s numbers it would be about 2.7 billion.

Fauci is clearly trying to justify political action. It is amazing to see that he was not immediately accused of fraud by many scientists. But nowadays if you say the right thing, no one questions your science. If you say the wrong thing, however well substantiated, your career is over.

So even though the modern world looks to science for salvation, they can’t even get that right.

Tom attached the following chart to prove his point. COVID-19 is named Wuhan Flu in the chart and graphic below:

Past Pandemics			World population in 2020: 7,800,000,000
Event	Years	Est. deaths	World pop. at time	% of world pop.	2020 equiv.	Severity comp. to Wuhan Flu (COVID-19)
Plague of Justinian	541-49	50,000,000	200,000,000	25	1,950,000,000	1,950
Bubonic Plague	1340-49	136,500,000	390,000,000	35	2,730,000,000	2,730
Smallpox	1520	56,000,000	500,000,000	11	873,600,000	874
Third Plague	1855	12,000,000	1,265,000,000	1	73,992,095	74
Spanish Flu	1918-19	50,000,000	1,900,000,000	2.6	205,263,158	205
Hong Kong Flu	1968-69	1,000,000	3,540,000,000	.028	2,203,390	2
HIV/AIDS	1981-now	30,000,000	7,000,000,000	0.429	33,428,571	33
Wuhan Flu	2020	1,000,000	7,800,000,000	0.013	1,000,000	1

He also included the following graphic, which makes the absurdity of Dr. Fauci’s claim even easier to see. The scale is in millions, using the percentage of deaths in equivalent population figures today:

Note: Neither of us is saying that we should ignore Dr. Fauci when he is fulfilling the medical task for which he was appointed. This is just one more cautionary tale about pretending to translate the prestige of science into support for whatever beliefs and causes happen to be popular in the dominant culture at the moment. It is a warning to all scientists not to twist scientific data to advance an agenda.