Did we know COVID-19 was coming?
Did we know COVID-19 was coming? Expats Living in Rome reviews the most pertinent “prophecies”.
Nostradamus hinted at a plague on the Tiber river in his 1555 Les Prophietes. Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion eerily rolls out a similar plot to what’s unfolding now. A verse in the book of Chronicles has theologians tying COVID-19, the Australian wildfires, and African locust swarms to the second coming of Christ. Many prophecies have now been brought to light in this rapidly-evolving worldwide pandemic. Here we take a moment to examine a few of those closest in relation to the December outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Sylvia Browne
It was mid-2008 when self-declared psychic Sylvia Browne published End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World. The book was a bestseller at the time but was long forgotten until it went viral recently, when a photo of a page appeared in American reality TV star Kim Kardashian’s Instagram.
"In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments," it said. "Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely."
In slight contradiction to her prevision, the COVID-19 virus can produce pneumonia-like symptoms in some of its victims, whilst with many others, it only brings forth mild flu or cold-like symptoms. This chilling prophecy however, has spurred her publication to number two on Amazon’s bestseller’s list! Unfortunately the author of 40 parapsychology books is no longer alive to capitalize on her skyrocketed sales, as she passed away in 2013. If her prophecies were 100% reliable, she had predicted that she would still be alive until the age of 88, she said in her 2003 appearance on the Larry King Live show. She passed on at age 77 instead. Browne was quite successful towards the latter part of her career. She began professionally offering psychic services in the US in 1974, started her own church in 1986, and eventually enjoyed mainstream success, appearing on shows such as Montell Williams, and charging $850 per phone call consultation.
One could argue that her prophecy for 2020 has validity, given the current world pandemic, however many of her other predictions have since been debunked.
Dean Koontz
American novelist Dean Koontz has become a household name, a long-time author of thrillers which span over several decades. Never once has his fictional writing been entangled with prophecies or psychic capabilities until now. Koontz published a novel entitled The Eyes of Darkness in 1981.
In it, Koontz’s character describes the situation "'A Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China's most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade,'" it goes on to say "'They call the stuff 'Wuhan-400' but it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center. Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon.'"
This is the extent of the reference to the COVID-19 strain, however the hardcover book, with limited printing, is now priced at up to $400, with no audiobook or Kindle version available yet.
Bill Gates
Microsoft’s co-founder and the world’s richest man, Bill Gates is also credited for his philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to building the quality of life from poverty to health issues on a global scale. An important project for the foundation has been its intervention efforts in the Ebola outbreaks of Africa.
In his March 2015 Ted talk The Next Outbreak: We’re not ready , Gates called for more public awareness to the inevitability of a worldwide pandemic, requesting ‘germ games’ like that of war games preparation and ‘advanced R&D’
“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes. Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We're not ready for the next epidemic.” He continues “The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about… You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism. So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse.”
For more information about his thoughts and efforts can be found on his personal blogsite: Gatesnotes.com.
