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.
