Collectivist Fear Rooted in Unscientific Beliefs

The nonfiction historical novel The Ghost Map, written by the British author Steven Johnson, unfolds the story of the cholera outbreak that swept through London in the mid-19th century and of the real historical figure John Snow (1813–1858). In that book, Johnson says the following: “It’s not that fear contributed to the spread of the disease. But fear was in fact the defining emotion of urban life.”

In mid-19th-century Britain, the theory that disease was spread by miasma helped amplify people’s fears. People whispered that simply breathing the air near the site of an outbreak could put one’s life in danger. Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890), who led British public health policy in the first half of the 19th century, was especially devoted to the miasma theory.

In effect, the thousands of cholera deaths in the 1850s stemmed from various decisions Chadwick made in the 1840s, especially from his belief that “all foul odors cause serious disease.” In exchange for removing miasma from buildings and streets, the River Thames was transformed into a vast sewer. In the 1840s and early 1850s, many of London’s cesspits were closed, and household and street excrement and garbage were all dumped into the river.

The Thames, once fishing waters where schools of salmon swam, was instantly turned into the most polluted waterway in the world. As the amount of waste dumped into the river increased, so did the number of cholera deaths. Compared with Chadwick’s foolishness, Florence Nightingale—who was also, like many of her contemporaries, a believer in the miasma theory—may have overemphasized ventilation, but her ignorance was relatively harmless. After all, supplying fresh air to hospital wards was not wrong in itself.

Johnson asks in his book, “How did actions born of noble aspirations produce such disastrous results? Chadwick’s case is easy to explain. Chadwick relied stubbornly on his nose.” Even as mountains of evidence accumulated showing that the miasma theory was false, many British intellectuals of the time, Chadwick included, could hardly escape its grip. Many historians of medicine have sought the cause in the fundamental characteristics of the human sense of smell and its place in the structure of the brain.

Yet the global COVID-19 situation in the 21st century resembles the European intellectual world in Johnson’s book that had sunk into the miasma theory. Even now, contradictory social distancing policies under the banner of “living with COVID” and vaccine passport policies are still being implemented.

In particular, the current quarantine policy that terrifies the public with case counts is nothing less than vicious, a mixture of bias and obstinacy. Frightening people with the number of confirmed cases presupposes that being infected carries a high probability of death. But the number of COVID deaths itself rests on medical standards for statistical classification that are deeply flawed.

There is a reason I use strong words like “vicious.” The most pernicious aspect is that, as experts, they have skillfully and selectively used the so-called “scientific attitude” in support of their own bias. For example, with regard to deaths from vaccine side effects and their relationship to vaccination, causality has been recognized only with precision—or rather, with extreme conservatism. As a result, among the more than 1,000 people who died in Korea after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency has recognized causality in only two cases.

Yet for many of the deaths so far called COVID deaths, causality has rarely been subjected to the same strict standards applied in the vaccine cases above. If someone tested positive for COVID-19 and later died while still positive—regardless of whether they were treated in a hospital or not—they were generally classified as having died from COVID. No rigorous analysis of the cause of death was required. Strictly determining the cause of death would require an autopsy and histological examination of lung tissue, but in most cases that was not done.

Indeed, compared with those who died after COVID infection, it would be more reasonable to regard deaths following vaccination as having a much higher likelihood of causality, because most of those who died after vaccination had originally had no problems with their immunity or health.

What we know so far as the number of COVID deaths is merely the result of the KDCA’s practice of counting as COVID deaths all cases in which the COVID-19 virus was detected in a deceased person’s specimen. The problem is that, unlike deaths after vaccination, there was neither a social incentive nor any pressure to make a thorough determination of the cause of death.

As a result, compared with deaths after vaccination, deaths after COVID infection have been granted an extremely generous presumption of causality between the infection and the death. In effect, correlation between the two has been treated as causation. For example, in the United States alone, nearly 750,000 “COVID deaths” were recorded this year. But among the many people who died after testing positive, how many can truly be judged, in strict medical terms, to have died because of the COVID-19 virus?

According to the materials cited by the authors in the widely read COVID-related book published last year by Sucharit Bhakdi and Karina Reiss, among those classified as COVID deaths, nearly half died from cardiovascular disease, one-third from cancer, and 10 percent from respiratory infections. Even these respiratory infections, they say, were always caused by multiple pathogens, including coronaviruses. In short, this simply reproduced the ordinary pattern of elderly deaths from underlying illnesses, with only a spoonful of the coronavirus added on top.

In Korea as well, the KDCA announced in April 2020 that 164 of 165 COVID deaths involved people with underlying conditions. Yet from June 2020 onward, for some reason, it has no longer disclosed even the presence of underlying conditions among COVID deaths to the public.

This double standard by the government toward deaths after vaccination and deaths after COVID infection is a representative example of an irresponsible cover-up policy, or of the selective abuse of a scientific attitude. In other words, when the very concept of a COVID death is opaque and questionable, what meaning can the announcement of case counts possibly have, and what legitimacy can quarantine policies based on those case counts claim?

COVID-19 infection is, in the end, only a variant of the existing coronavirus family—that is, the common cold virus—and even if one estimates its danger generously, it is merely a respiratory infection similar to influenza or pneumonia, not a terribly dangerous fatal disease, despite what we have been led to believe without question. Mountains of evidence are accumulating to this effect. Take the United States, for example, which was rumored to have suffered the bitterest blow from COVID and whose leaders wailed that compensation should be demanded from China. In the United States, about 1.4 million people die each year from pneumonia and influenza. In any case, that is roughly the annual toll from respiratory infections.

In 2021, 1 million people in the United States died from respiratory infections such as pneumonia, influenza, and COVID. Of those, as mentioned earlier, 750,000 are claimed to have died from COVID. In other words, even the U.S. case—where people cried out that countless COVID patients were filling hospitals and that exploding COVID deaths were paralyzing society—shows that, viewed overall, deaths from respiratory infections did not surge dramatically but rather decreased dramatically. This should be called alarmism.

In conclusion, the world has by no means become more dangerous than before because of the coronavirus. The conclusion and the truth are that fear of the coronavirus was stoked. Why must we wear masks every day for two years and endure restrictions on work, school, and all social activity merely to avoid the inconvenience of suffering symptoms no worse than those of a common cold?

Nevertheless, not one of the expert authorities who have led quarantine policy has ever publicly debated a group of experts holding different views. They continue to cling only to the irresponsible and irrational attitude that they merely followed the same policies adopted by the United States and other European countries.

The problem is that the Korean public does not seem to recognize this as much of a problem. Even while suffering serious restrictions on basic rights, people make no minimum effort to seek out the truth. Is it because trust in the government is that high?

For example, in Europe and the United States there was strong social backlash against compulsory mask-wearing as part of COVID-19 quarantine policy. Why did nothing similar appear in Korea? Those who view this positively say it shows Koreans overcoming the evils of individualism and willingly accepting personal inconvenience for the sake of the community.

But I cannot agree with that view. In my opinion, the fundamental reason is that Korean society’s understanding of individual rights still remains at a premodern, material level. More recently, the right to pursue happiness and similar rights have been continually emphasized—despite their conceptual ambiguity—as a justification for expanding universal welfare policy. Yet even while individuals are deprived of the right to breathe freely, which is among the most basic human rights, they show no interest because no violation of material rights, such as economic loss, is taking place.

People will do whatever they can to obtain compensation from someone who scratches their car, yet while suffering violations of personhood from having to live by totalitarian directives and orders in everyday life, they pay no attention because the harm does not appear in monetary terms. It is simply a material-centered society, a society devoid of philosophy. Korean society has never overcome the problem of individualism. On the contrary, it is a society that still has much to learn and study about individualism.

Min Bae, history teacher at Soongeui Girls’ High School

---

Original title: 비과학적 믿음에 근거한 집단주의적 공포

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2021-11-26

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=9&idx=24346