In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that there was a “pandemic” of a new disease called ‘COVID-19’. However, there was a critical problem from the start. On 7 July that year, the historically well-respected Cochrane group published a systematic review to determine how doctors were supposed to diagnose the “new” disease in either the office or hospital setting. The conclusion of the review was staggering because it stated that:    

“based on currently available data, neither absence nor presence of signs or symptoms are accurate enough to rule in or rule out disease.”

This meant that the traditional diagnostic techniques – taking a careful history and examining the patient – were useless in determining whether a person had the alleged new disease. Perhaps not surprisingly, something very odd was seen the following month when the WHO published its official COVID-19 case definition stating that a confirmed case was:

“a person with laboratory confirmation of COVID-19 infection, irrespective of clinical signs and symptoms.”

In other words, a loop of circular reasoning was created in which a case was defined by a test and this test defined a case. It was a monumental sleight of hand that disconnected the concept of disease from the case definition.

Indeed, during the COVID-19 era, many aspects of time-honoured medical practice were flipped on their head. When I was a medical student 20 years ago, a large part of our training was dedicated to the art of making a diagnosis. We were cautioned that while there was an ever-increasing number of “diagnostic” tests available, the most important part was listening to the person in front of you and carefully examining them. After that, the doctor may elect to perform tests to provide confirmatory evidence for the suspected diagnosis or at least use a test to help differentiate between competing “differential” diagnoses.

We also need to take pause here to consider the WHO’s insertion of, “irrespective of clinical signs and symptoms” into the case definition. Most people would assume that a pandemic would involve a huge number of sick people – that is, the counted cases have an actual disease. However, the confirmed ‘COVID-19’ case definition did not require anyone to be sick, it simply required them to have a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, or in subsequent years, a positive rapid antigen test (RAT).

While many governments and media platforms promoted the alleged impressive cumulative death numbers during the COVID-19 era, for most of us, it was a different experience. It was clear that the vast majority of “cases” were indistinguishable from the usual colds and flu we had always seen. In Australia, influenza apparently all but disappeared in 2021 and was suspiciously replaced by an almost equivalent number of COVID-19 cases as I explained in a 2022 presentation.

A huge proportion of asymptomatic cases caused the COVID numbers to soar even higher, particularly when governments started distributing RATs. Other independent researchers also concluded that the nature of the “pandemic” boiled down to one of testing, not one of a new disease.

“Even the mainstream media had difficulty hiding the fact that asymptomatic cases were the majority of the positive cases as well as the fact that the more testing that was done, the more cases that would ultimately be ‘found.’…If the tests went away, so, too, did the ‘pandemic’.”

On first glance, it may appear incredible that there could be an officially-declared pandemic without any global increase in sick people. However, it can be understood by taking into account a high-level deception that took place in 2009. That was the year the WHO unilaterally redefiined the definition of ‘pandemic’ and the words, “with enormous numbers of deaths and illness” were suddenly excluded from the existing meaning.

Many people realised that there was something wrong with the COVID narratives being promulgated by governments and many media platforms. Unfortunately, the relentless fear-messaging convinced the majority that there was some degree of a “deadly pandemic” to be concerned about.

The stark reality is that there was no evidence COVID-19 was a new disease because as the official case definition specified, there were no required symptoms or signs for confirmed cases. This means that the only requirement to count cases were “positive” RAT or PCR tests. In other words, the “new” disease was only defined by some new tests. And positive tests did not need to have any relationship to what the individual was sick with or whether they were even sick at all.

Was COVID-19 the greatest scam of our lifetimes?

Dr Sam Bailey is a content creator, medical author and health educator from New Zealand. Her books include Virus Mania, Terrain Therapy and The Final Pandemic.

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