As conspiracy theories around COVID19 increase, social media has seen the circulation of a video which is often introduced as a movie that shows the Virus was engineered. But a check by ETN24 reveals that the movie was not about what the editor of the short clip carefully edited it to look like.
Titled “Dead Zone – Plague,” the video has pulled very close to a million views on Youtube alone, within six days. Yet there are a number of misconceptions it propagates.
One in 81 Episodes
What is circulated as a movie is actually bits from clips from an episode of a TV Series. These clips are all from a single episode out of 81 Episodes cutting across six seasons which lasted for five years. The other 80 Episodes made no reference to viruses or disease. The episode in question was also not even about the virus but a psychic who saw a vision of some kids falling sick.
A different Plot
The show was based on characters from Stephen Kings’ 1979 book “The Dead Zone”. In King’s book, the word ‘virus’ appeared just once and it was not related to COVID19. The story is centered on a fictional accident victim who was in a coma for six years. Upon recovery, the character developed the ability to see visions of the past and the future. This central story was told through 81 stories which were sometimes based on what has happened before. Before and after the episode in contention, there had been episodes of how the main character stops serial killers, connected people based on his abilities, saw inside a person’s heart and discovered an ailment, and knew the accused in a murder case was innocent, among others.
The Plague
Aside from being an episode in a series of fiction, the clip circulating as evidence that COVID19 had been planned did not accurately describe COVID19. It was a situation at a school, as against a global one. Also, kids were the ones getting sick, whereas, for COVID19, relatively few cases have been seen in children thus far. According to the World Health Organisation, just 2.4% of cases in China involved people under 19 years of age. A similar situation was reported in the United States. Dr. Dyan Hes, a pediatrician with New York City’s Gramercy Pediatrics, says,
“Most of them, probably 80 to 90% of them, are asymptomatic. I think that the mortality rate is way, way less than 0.5% for children who have it because it is so prevalent. You have to remember thousands of kids die from flu a year. This is much, much less virulent in children.”
Another difference is that, while the depiction in the video showed a collection of a swab, for testing, from the mouth, COVID19 involves a Nasopharyngeal swab.
Also, the clip clearly shows that the episode was made after the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), as upon seeing the vision, the psychic character is asked if the disease he is seeing is “like SARS”. This goes ahead to explain every other reference to facemask, CDC, and locking down of the school that was predicted as infected.
The episode titled “The Plague” was aired on July 13, 2003; the same month the SARS epidemic ended. Seeing that the epidemy broke out a year before that, SARS was very much still in the News when the episode was created. The World Health Organisation also made reference to a possible outbreak in the future, hence the fictional presentation of another SARS-like outbreak was not new, at the time.
The Chloroquine Connection
The clips also show how the psychic recommended Anti-Malaria drug, Chloroquine, for the treatment of the disease; a suggestion many assume would have been unknown at the time due to a misconception that the use of Chloroquine to fight viral infections is new. But it is not. A 2003 paper by Lancet talks extensively about this,
“the tolerability, low cost, and immunomodulatory properties of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine are associated with biochemical effects that suggest a potential use in viral infections, some of whose symptoms may result from the inflammatory response.” It said
As early as 2001, researches already wrote papers on how Chloroquine can be used to fight virus generally, including HIV.
It is not clear why, but the idea that conspiracies are often told in movies and novels beforehand is common among those who believe in conspiracy theories.
