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Although the pandemic industry claims otherwise, one hundred years of discovery and evidence show that “zero covid” is impossible to achieve. Yet this is the idea that many governments and their collaborators pushed during the covid era.

It is ignorance of the history of discovery and study of respiratory viruses over the last 100 years that ensures that distorted and unrealistic messages such as “zero covid” are easily spread.

What Dr. John Snow discovered more than 100 years ago is still relevant today.  He said in the 1850s that when an agent has run out of susceptibles, its circulation sharply declines in a matter of days or weeks. 

Dr. John Snow was a British surgeon and general practitioner who is considered one of the founders of epidemiology, the study of the spread of diseases. In 1854, he investigated a cholera outbreak in London’s Soho neighbourhood, which was a major turning point in the understanding of the disease.

Snow began by mapping the cases of cholera, noting that they were concentrated around a particular water pump on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street). He also interviewed local residents and collected data on the cases.

Snow’s investigation led him to conclude that the outbreak was caused by contaminated water from the Broad Street pump. He discovered that the pump was located near a cesspit, which was a common source of sewage and waste. Snow’s data showed that people who drank water from the pump were more likely to contract cholera than those who did not.

Below is the fifth of a series of 18 posts by Trust the Evidence telling the story of Dr. John Snow (1813-1858), a pioneer in both anaesthetics and epidemiology.

The 18-part series begins with a brief biographical sketch, followed by Snow’s investigation of the mode of transmission of cholera in Victorian London, his premature death and the near oblivion to which his work was consigned for over 50 years, and its eventual rediscovery and re-publication by the American epidemiologist Wade Hampton Frost.  The series follows the evolution of the cholera pandemics of 1848-49 and 1854 and gives some health-political background to the events surrounding them.

The fifth in the series demonstrates that what Dr. Snow discovered regarding an outbreak naturally runs its course because, essentially, it runs out of susceptible people to infect.  Yet governments ignored this and implemented draconian measures to “flatten the curve” to slow down the spread of a coronavirus.

John Snow, Asiatic Cholera and the Inductive-Deductive Method – Republished

By By Prof. Carl Heneghan and Dr. Tom Jefferson

The Snow series is an educational course. We hope you will recognise our efforts by donating to Trust the Evidence or becoming a paying subscriber, as writing the series took a lot of time and effort.

“The duration of cholera in a place is usually in direct proportion to the number of the population.”—John Snow M.D., Mode Of Communication Cholera (second edition), pg. 115

We saw in Lecture 3 that Snow deduced by the presence of an incubation period that the morbid poison of cholera needed time to replicate.  Now, he makes a further deduction (page 56).

Snow deduced that it must resemble a cell as it reproduces itself inside the body. This deduction is pure logic as no one had then connected what we now call Vibrio Cholerae Pacini to the onset of cholera. The vibrios were visible with a microscope, but as we shall see in Lecture 17, the connection between micro-organisms and disease had been made in a faraway land. Lacking modern communication, the two had not been reconciled.

When you make a logical deduction from true premises, the chances of reaching a rational conclusion are high.

With this deduction, Snow aligns with Fracastoro’s contagium animatum theory (see Lecture 4).

In ‘On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 1st edition (MCC 1)’, published in 1849, Snow proposed two main modes of transmission.

The first was what we now call a propagated source outbreak. This was mainly due to his observation of the closeness of cases with water, either from rivers, harbours or wells. He assumed these were contaminated not from miasmata but from what he called a “poison” or a “morbid poison” specific to cholera.

In the second edition, MCC 2, he published a table showing the highest mortality among seafarers and longshoremen, presumably due to their contact with contaminated drinking water.

The painting by William Atkins shows the density of vessels in Portsmouth Harbour. Both HMS Victory in the middle ground and the troop transport HMS Serapis on the right are shown departing. The hulks in the background had crews and were used as living accommodations with no sanitary facilities. Everything went overboard, creating a pool of contaminated water.

This was more concentrated, and the poison multiplied when there was little rainfall and in the heat, which explained some of its apparent capriciousness.

Contemporary Themes

Contemporary ignorance of the history of discovery and study of respiratory viruses from 1936 to today ensures that distorted and unrealistic messages such as “zero covid” are easily spread. 

Watch the video below.

These have had the catastrophic effect of inducing governments into introducing draconian measures in the “short sharp shock” tradition of “do it and we are done” and a complete distortion of the precautionary principle. One hundred years of discovery and evidence now show us that zero viral circulation of an agent is impossible to achieve, and the draconian measures massively impact society and its weakest, both personally, socially and economically.

The reason why respiratory viruses “move on” as in the descending curve of Farr’s Law of Epidemics (see Lecture 10) is not completely understood. However, Snow’s aphorism cited at the beginning of this lecture holds true. When an agent has run out of susceptibles, its circulation sharply declines in a matter of days or weeks.

Readings

Robert Dingwall. The precautionary principle. Doing stuff ‘just in case’ is not precautionary. You need evidence. Trust the Evidence 14 November 2022.

Read more: The precautionary principle by Professor Robert Dingwall as published by Trust the Evidence on 14 November 2022

[Note: The article ‘The precautionary principle’ is behind a paywall.  On 14 November 2022, The Daily Sceptic published an article by Robert Dingwall titled ‘Doing Stuff Without Evidence is the Opposite of the ‘Precautionary Principle’’.  While we do not know how similar the content of the two articles are, The Daily Sceptic article is free to read if you do not have a subscription to read Trust the Evidence articles.]

About the Authors

Carl Heneghan is a professor of Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (“CEBM”) and NHS Urgent Care general practitioner who regularly appears in the media. Tom Jefferson is a clinical epidemiologist and a Senior Associate Tutor at the University of Oxford.  Together they publish articles on a Substack page titled ‘Trust the Evidence’.

Featured image: The John Snow Pub, London. Source: BBVA Open Mind