Heard of the SPARS pandemic? Probably not, mainly because it has not happened yet. It is scheduled for 2025 – 2028 so, not too long to wait. Such a pandemic may not occur because SPARS is fictional. It is the brainchild of a project team working at The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in the United States, published as The SPARS Pandemic.
Described as ‘A futuristic Scenario for public health risk communicators’ the SPARS pandemic is a 77-page document published in 2017. A PDF of the document can be downloaded here. I took a straw poll of people I thought might have heard about it and only one replied in the affirmative that they had remarking that the first victim to die—in the fictional account—looked remarkably like former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, and she does.
When I first encountered the document, quite by accident on Google, my first question was ‘who has the time to sit around dreaming up stuff like this?’ Having read it, that question remains unanswered. One blurb about the document on The Johns Hopkins website says, in addition to describing the basic premise of the document: “Lessons learned from the scenario development and how the scenario can be used to improve communication are also discussed.”
It escapes me how lessons can be learned from fiction. If that is the case, then Albert Camus’ The Plague or the more recent book by Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague, could surely serve just as well. Nevertheless, curiosity compelled a read and there are some similarities, but also some remarkable differences from the scenarios and solutions portrayed in The SPARS Pandemic from the recent Covid-19 scamdemic.
SPARS is an acronym for the ‘St Paul’s Acute Respiratory Syndrome’ both referring to the place where the first death took place and also an homage to and homophone of the great non-event of 2003, the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong (I was there!). Thus, we hear about the mode of spread (droplet in this case), about people voluntarily self-isolating and the disputed concept of asymptomatic spread. Of course, there is the inevitable development of a novel vaccine, Corovax by name. But there, largely, the parallels stop.
While the thorny issue of those pesky anti-vaccination groups arises, there is absolutely no mention of lockdowns, compulsory self-isolation, testing, compulsory vaccination or face masks. In fact, the authors are at pains to emphasise the need for transparency regarding all aspects of the public health response to SPARS. The company producing the vaccine, CynBio, is granted immunity from liability regarding any vaccines produced, but this probably illustrates how well the authors understand how Big Pharma has most major governments by the short and curlies in the first place.
The document asks how health authorities should best reassure the public that expedited vaccine development is not rushed or flawed. Contrast that with the response of governments during Covid-19; they made no effort to explain, rather they accused anyone of raising the question of spreading misinformation.
The authors also question how public health communicators might seek best practices to enable people to “make their own informed decisions about whether to accept the novel SPARS vaccine”. That would certainly have been welcome during Covid-19 when we were simply sold a pack of lies regarding efficacy and safety and, again, if you dared to question this you were labelled and anti-vaxxer.
I had to laugh at two points. One referred to the potential for unrest among health workers if they were not prioritised for the vaccine. The Covid-19 era approach was to try to make it compulsory on pain of dismissal. The other referred to the CDC publishing data which showed that the initial estimates of case fatality rates were too high. That would simply never have happened during Covid-19 when anyone with a calculator—even based on the initial figures coming out of Wuhan during Covid -19 (I was there too)—could see that the risk of death from Covid-19 and the overall numbers of death (everyone was at risk and all of us, essentially, were going to die) were wildly exaggerated.
The SPARS Pandemic is, ostensibly, about communication strategies and that includes strategies around anti-vaccine campaigns and vaccine damages. While scenarios are posited, and strategies to make the official public health line available, including intrusion into social media and other broadcasts, there is absolutely no mention of censorship or demonisation. The document comes from an age, less than a decade ago (2017), when public health officials clearly believed that people ought to be treated as autonomous beings and with respect. How far we came in the intervening years leading up to 2020.
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
