Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Did Rev. Paul Dhinakaran & Sylvia Browne Predict The Coronavirus?


            Jesus Calls, a ministry of Rev. Paul Dhinkaran, claims that he prophesied the Coronavirus pandemic in 2016.

            A YouTube video1 posted by Jesus Calls shows Rev. Paul Dhinkaran predicting a pestilence.2

            Did Rev. Paul Dhinakaran predict the Coronavirus in 2016?

            This is Rev. Paul Dhinakaran’s prophecy, “[Firstly, He showed me about China.] A pestilence shall first go across the nations of the East, even in greater China. When nobody else can help them they will cry out to me, says the Lord. As the pestilence goes across the land, my grace shall then follow and people shall be redeemed. My healing presence shall flow across the land of China and they will know that I am the only Savior and their only Redeemer. As waters flow from the high mountains so will My anointing and grace flow from China, then to all the regions around. There will be great joy. This is God’s prophecy or Word about China and the nations of the East surrounding them.3 

            How do we understand this prophecy?

            First, Rev. Paul Dhinakaran’s prophecy is not about Coronavirus. His prophecy is about redemption (of people in China and its neighboring countries). The pestilence is to be a means to an end.

            Second, according to the prophecy, the consequence of the pestilence is the redemption or salvation of people. This state is yet to be realized. If the redemption of people fails to occur through Covid-19, then the prophecy was not about Covid-19.     
    
            Third, this prophecy is far from being fulfilled. The prophecy states that China and its neighboring countries will be in a joyous state. Sadly though, at this time, uncertainty looms large everywhere. 

            So is this prophecy referring to Coronavirus?

            Maybe or may not be. If the prophecy is to be true, there should be a redemption of people in China and neighboring countries now (after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic). If the redemption of people does not occur, then the prophecy is not referring to Coronavirus.

            Why did Jesus Calls jump the gun to claim that this prophecy is referring to Coronavirus?

            I do not know.

            Having claimed, I wonder if they are seeking to validate Rev. Paul Dhinkaran as a trustworthy prophet of God.

            Moving on to Sylvia Browne…

            When Kim Kardashian shares a message on social media, that message has the potential to become viral. Combine Kim’s fame with Coronavirus, what do we get? An instantly viral message!

            When Kim shared that psychic Sylvia Browne predicted Coronavirus 12 years ago, that message went viral. But is this prediction factual?

            Sylvia Browne’s prediction is inaccurate according to an article on the website of CFI (Center for Inquiry):4

In her 2008 book End of Days, Browne (who died in 2013) predicted that “In around [sic] 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”
This led to many on social media assuming that Browne had accurately predicted the Covid-19 outbreak, and no less a respected authority than Kim Kardashian shared such posts…
… Let’s revisit the passage in question: “In around 2020 [sic] a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.”
There’s a lot packed into these two sentences, so let’s parse this out. First, we have an indefinite date range (“in around 2020”), which depends on how loosely you interpret the word “around”: Browne doesn’t write “In 2020,” which would narrow it down to one calendar year; she writes “in around” whose grammatically awkward construction suggests to the editor in me that she (or her editor) added the word “around” in a late draft to make it more general—a typical psychic technique. What “around 2020” means varies by subjective criterion, and could plausibly include a range of plus or minus three or more years: Most people would probably agree that 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023 are “around” 2020. Using this range we see that Browne’s spread is over seven (or more) years—well over half a decade.
So what did Browne predict would happen sometime during those years? “A severe pneumonia-like illness.” Covid-19 is not “a severe pneumonia-like illness,” though it can in some cases lead to pneumonia. Most of those infected (about 80%) have mild symptoms and recover just fine, and the disease has a mortality rate of between 2% and 4%. There are two types of coronaviruses—Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome—that “can cause severe respiratory infections,” but Covid-19 is not among them; both SARS and MERS are far more deadly.
Where will it go, according to Browne? It “will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes.” Covid-19 has now indeed spread throughout the globe, though the phrase “attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes” isn’t a prediction but merely restates any “pneumonia-like illness.”
But Browne also offers another specific characteristic of this disease, that of “resisting all known treatments.” This also does not describe Covid-19, which doesn’t “resist all known treatments”; in fact doctors know exactly how to treat (though not effectively vaccinate or quarantine, which are very different measures) the disease, and .it’s essentially the same for influenza or other similar respiratory infections. There’s nothing unique about Covid-19’s resistance to treatment.
In the second sentence she further describes the illness: “Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.” This is false, at least as of now. Covid-19 has not “suddenly vanished as quickly as it arrived,” and even if it eventually does, its emergence pattern would have to be compared with other typical epidemiology data to know whether it’s “baffling.” Infectious diseases (especially ones such as respiratory illnesses) have predictable patterns, and modeling outbreaks is a whole branch of public health. Given a normal distribution (bell curve) of cases, it would not necessarily be “baffling” if the disease subsided as quickly as it arose. In fact what would be astonishing is if it did not; in other words if over the course of a week or two, the infection rates plummeted inexplicably as no new infections were reported at all. That would be an amazing psychic prediction. Furthermore note that the prediction couldn’t even be mostly validated until 2030, since it references a recurrence of the disease ten years later—a neat trick for a prediction made (or at least made public) nearly a quarter-century earlier. And as to whether it would “then disappear completely,” I suppose that could be determined true or false at some point around the end of time, so expect a follow-up piece from me then.
So we have a two-sentence prediction written in 2008 by a convicted felon with a long track record of failures. Half of the prediction (the second sentence) have demonstrably not happened. The other half of the prophecy describes an infectious respiratory illness that does not resemble Covid-19 in its particulars and that would happen within a few years of 2020.

Endnotes:

       
2Merriam-Webster defines pestilence as a, “a contagious or infectious epidemic disease that is virulent and devastating.” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pestilence)

3https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JExOAjgVXZ0; Time: 1:12 to 2:08.

4https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/sylvia-brownes-non-psychic-non-coronavirus-prediction/

Websites last accessed on 17th March 2020.

No comments: