Roger Daltry of mod rock band The Who screamed “We won’t get fooled again” in its lengthy and punchy signature song. But it appears we have. Almost everything that those on the sceptical side of the Covid narrative recognise about the hyped-up nature of the recent pandemic will see parallels in Overturning Zika: the pandemic that never was by Randall S. Bock.
Bock is a U.S. physician who has long harboured scepticism about something that most of us had completely forgotten: the Zika ‘pandemic’ of 2015 in Brazil. Like COVID-19, this was accompanied by dire predictions of deaths in the millions and, parallel to the ridiculous and extraordinary locking down and social distancing mandates of 2020-2021, Zika was accompanied by ludicrous suggestions that women should not have babies and even abort the ones they were carrying. Some did.
Zika is a mosquito-borne virus that is present in South America. According to Wikipedia, it can be associated with the birth defect microcephaly, whereby a child is born with a smaller than normal brain. One source, GAVI (‘The Vaccine Alliance‘) claimed in 2022 that one third of babies exposed pre-birth to Zika developed microcephaly. However, it then proceeded to say there is a “continued need to develop a safe and effective vaccine for preventing Zika virus infections during pregnancy”. It has a vested interest in vaccine production and distribution.
It is worth pointing out that the author of this book is not a tin-foil hat wearing virus sceptic, ‘anti-vaxxer’ or conspiracy theorist. He does not deny the existence of the Zika virus, or specifically deny its potential to cause microcephaly and does not ascribe the manufacturing of the Zika pandemic to evil forces determined to reduce the population of the world. Instead, he examines the evidence as it stands, contextualises this within the scientific paradigm and examines some of the social and media forces at work which fan the flames. Thus, a smouldering fire of (misplaced) suspicion that there was an outbreak of Zika-related microcephaly in Brazil soon became a forest fire of panic across the country and elsewhere in the region.
The simple facts are that a case of microcephaly was attributed to Zika without a shred of evidence that Zika was the cause. Microcephaly occurs in possibly one in every 800-5,000 babies. If you go out armed with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail and other cases of microcephaly were soon identified and misattributed to Zika. In 2019, when Zika was now a distant blip in the rear-view mirror, Bock tried to publish a short review demonstrating that the accompanying pandemic had been a mistake, but major medical journals refused to publish it. This was not because it was inaccurate or that what was contained was not fairly common knowledge among the medical community, but in case it undermined public trust in public health initiatives related to Covid. This is what is now referred to as ‘malinformation’; something that is true but uncomfortable for those controlling the narrative.
The story, briefly, is that Zika was considered the cause of a cluster of cases of microcephaly. This was done against a background of poor baseline information about the extent of microcephaly and without specific laboratory testing for the presence of Zika. A purported Zika test had never been standardised and Zika and its close relative dengue fever are almost identical genetically and almost impossible to distinguish. Scepticism about the existence of Zika, based on the poor science applied to its characterisation was quashed and likewise scepticism about the link between it and microcephaly.
In the sceptical free zone that was allowed to exist around the Zika microcephaly story, local, national, regional and international panic ensued. Pregnant women lived in fear that their babies were going to be born brain damaged, the WHO issued travel advice related to the 2016 Brazil Olympics and NPR, never known to let a good pandemic go to waste, reported fears amongst athletes and staff at the games over Zika infection.
However, when accurate Zika testing became available in 2016, the purported link between the virus and microcephaly failed to hold. Zika-related microcephaly, now described as ‘rare’, just disappeared. The only reasonable conclusion, in the absence of a vaccine or additional preventive measures, was that it probably did not exist. In the meantime, pregnant women had been smothering themselves in insecticides potentially harmful to their unborn babies and the family planning lobby had got to work with increased calls for ‘net zero’ related to birth rates.
Bock traces the main characters involved from the group of physicians who initially raised the alarm, through incompetent national health officials up to the ubiquitous eminence grise, without whom no pandemic is complete, Anthony Fauci who said all the usual things about vaccines and public health measures. In this case, rather than being a driving force, Fauci jumped on the Zika bandwagon. What had started as a cock-up soon became a conspiracy. Fauci used Zika to “wage war” on pandemics. We now know what he meant.
The book is written in a very familiar and even colloquial style. It is reasonably easy to read and not too heavy, within the text, on scientific jargon. It does suffer, however, from a somewhat samizdat style of presentation and there is a great deal of repetition of what the appropriate scientific procedures should have been. That said, the opening synopsis is very helpful, makes all the main points and stands alone. The accompanying diagrams and figures are far too busy, poorly produced, and not signposted properly. On the whole, some ruthless editing may have helped to produce a more concise text. Nevertheless, this is a book that should be read.
Randall S. Bock (2023) Overturning Zika: the pandemic that never was. Drivestraight Publishing, Istanbul, is available to purchase on Amazon.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry.
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Reminded me of the claim by the BBC that 1,300 babies in Brazil had died from COVID by April 2021. Odd when babies were not from COVID anywhere else in the world.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-56696907
They quote Dr Fatima Marinho of Vital Strategies, an organisation that has received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2020/03/inv005999
To paraphrase The Who again:
“They call me The Zika, I’ve been searching low and high. I don’t get to get what I’m after, till the day you die.”
Zika was caused by Kill Gates’ MMR stabs in pregnant women. This has been known for many years.
Glad you mentioned this – I remember reading the same. New vaccination programme followed by defects in babies. No pregnant woman should take ANY pharmaceuticals period.
OK, maybe I’ve read the article too fast but what then caused all those babies to be born with tiny heads if it wasn’t the virus? I remember those images from the news and it was shocking.
“all those babies”
How many, again?
‘Microcephaly occurs in possibly one in every 800-5,000 babies.’
Birth defects occur all the time – gene mutation, problems in the womb as well as external factors.
Naturally occurring phenomenon are random, spread out but sometimes happen in clusters.
For example dice. You might cast the dice a hundred times and never throw a double-six, but then throw ten in succession.
In the UK, every so often there is a cluster of lukaemia victims which just happen to occur near to overhead power lines – therefore the clamour goes up that it was the power lines what done it. Proof is: the cluster of cases. But ignores clusters elsewhere not near power lines.
A cluster of cases is not proof of a causal link with some particular factor.
Slight correection – “The world moved on, and remembered the pictures, and never found out about the rebuttal.” And so old panics never die, but just build up in the public anxiety-centres. Vague fears about acid rain, ozone layers, diesel fumes, floating plastic continents, and so on add to the general unease long after they’ve been debunked.
I read a long article about this case some time ago. There were a couple of points that may well be included in the book but are worth just pointing out here:
Echoes of Covid, measles in Samoa, dancing in medieval Germany, another man made panic.
Good point. The same is true of air quality and food and water ‘contaminants’. We now have better sensing and measuring instruments capable of detecting things not detectable before and at levels not detectable before.
Therefore… air quality has got worse, more and more contaminants are in our food and water. The usual ninnies in the grand public run around shrieking, and the usual cast of characters rub their hands together at the prospect of making money/political capital/research grants, etc out of it.
The one thing we could have and they probably learned from that one was that Westerners, the richer and the more pampered the more, will easily panic and can be manipulated as such through such fearmongering.
I remember that the richest and least Olympian sport had serious problems fielding national teams, in particular the Anglo-Saxon countries saw massive cancellations from their top stars.
Though an Englishman then won the gold medal in that event at least.
Same cast they never give up do they.