Imagine that you had the resources and influence sufficient to create a global pandemic, what would you need to do? How would you get started? And how best to turn it to your advantage and boost your profits?

We have the answers right here. A simple 12 step plan.

1. Find some vague criteria for what constitutes the symptoms that you want people to look for. Anything subjective that a lot of people can identify with is ideal. Let us take memory problems and/or confusion + a few common ones from the Covid list. Tiredness, aches and pains are common and subjective enough. (For covid19 the symptoms are: fever, dry cough, tiredness. Less common symptoms: aches and pains, sore throat, diarrhoea, loss of taste or smell, a rash, or discolouration of fingers or toes)

It would be a good idea to take something that is very common in old people so that we can use death from old age as proof of the lethality of the new virus.

2. Then we would need something biological to test. Any RNA sequence would do, as long as it is not present in the whole population. If it were, someone might claim herd immunity very quickly. Actually it could be an RNA sequence that does not really exist in humans but something that could exist as contamination in labs, e.g. in dust or water.

That would be enough for a RT qPCR test to pick up as a false positive. Many RT PCRs have false positive rates of 3-5 % and that would be plenty to create a scare. (When it comes to Covid, the false positive rate is impossible to know for sure, since we don’t have a gold standard to check against, but for many other similar tests, the average false positive rate is over 3%. And different labs are testing for different sequences.

We can count on over-stressed labs to be more prone to contamination than labs taking part in research knowing they will be checked for accuracy, the ones that gave over 3% false positives. Maybe the error rate for the average stressed lab is as high as 8%. BMJ counts 5% as a reasonable estimate. With 8% we would have all positive tests in the US explained by false positives)

3. Then we are all set to go. We just have to claim that we have discovered a new cluster of symptoms and that is related to a new RNA sequence. It starts with memory loss, and confusion. In other words this is a neurotoxic virus, and it leads to death in all the ways old people can die, by strokes, heart attacks, pneumonia, kidney failure, sepsis, organ failure, dehydration.

It doesn’t matter if the patient was close to deaths door anyway, because of existing problems. We can always claim that without our new virus, they would not have died. Who could counter that? (Just like Covid; People die from all kinds of disorders that they already had before they got the Covid test)

4. By some miracle we have already discovered exactly the virus that is responsible among the millions of different viruses that exist in any cubic centimeter of air. So we already have a RT PCR test read to go. This makes us look like very competent researchers. Of course we have bought stock in the major testing labs ahead of time.

We’ve bought stocks in the biggest vaccine manufacturers also of course. That will be the biggest money maker finally, hopefully for years since it will be difficult to get antibodies to something that doesn’t really exist.

5. So now we just have to spread the news that a new deadly pandemic is spreading all over the world, and every country has to start testing. We can count on the 5% hypochondriacs in the general population to come forth to be tested first.

It will always take some time for each country to get started ramping up their testing, so the graphs are guaranteed to look exponential in the beginning.

6. All you need now is for people to bring their old and confused elderly in for testing, and with 5% false positives, we will soon have most hospital beds filled with old sick confused patients.

We can count on doctors to treat them aggressively. Most of these old people will be on a cocktail of drugs already, so adding a few more drugs as “heroic treatment” will be sure to push them over the edge.

Many will have pneumonia from the seasonal flu, so we can just prolong this by putting them on ventilators. Then they will die a month later and we can say it wasn’t the flu since the flu season should have stopped a month earlier.

7. The graphs of numbers tested positive will be exponential in the beginning, but flatten off as the testers reach their max level. After some time the lab technicians will be exhausted and tend to become sloppy, the pressure for testing will be relentless and the labs will get dirtier and dirtier, and we will get higher and higher false-positive rates.

Usually the media will be satisfied with reporting just the number of positive tests, but in case anybody should think of checking proportion of positive tests compared to total number of tests, they would get a higher number each week because of overworked, error-prone lab workers.

Eventually, society will run out of hypochondriacs who will come for tests voluntarily, and many will have understood that should they test positive, they will be put together with really sick people, unprotected, since they all have the same virus…So the curves will flatten and start going down.

8. If you want to destroy the economy during the pandemic, you will get some programmer to make a prediction of millions of deaths (actually 70 million die every year anyway, so that is not really difficult) if we don’t lock down society.

We just have to scare them to lock down right before the curve flattens (when we are running out of the 5% hypochondriacs) and all the politicians will think they saved their country.

9. Just for fun, to see how strangely we could make gullible people act, we could invent different strategies for protection. Social distancing can look really funny in a supermarket, and all the original ways of saluting is interesting , leg touching elbow touching (even if we cough in our elbows now).

We could make a lot of money on masks, gloves and sanitisers too.

10.In order to make money on vaccines, we will start testing antibodies. Here the false-positive error rate is even greater, so we may easily get 10% with antibodies just from false positives. But on retest, we will statistically get only one percent testing positive if we test the same people.

That means that we can claim that we will need many boosters of the vaccine. In order to maximise the profit, we may put something in the vaccine that makes people sick and then we can cure them with a very expensive drug produced by a company we have already invested in. But to be sure maximum number of countries will pay almost any price for the vaccine, we have to wait until they are really desperate.

11. We can always count on several waves of the virus since the common flu and colds will come every year and kill hundreds of thousands like every year, and 3-10% of them will test false positive for our virus every time.

So we have a fantastic moneymaker for years: Expensive tests, expensive drugs, and expensive vaccines for 7 billion people every year.

12. We can count on doctors being sure that they are right in all they do. They will counter each other in every turn, and since there is no real new disease to cure, the research will run into endless blind alleys. This will prime all doctors for accepting a vaccine.

We just have to make sure there is no cheap effective drug commonly available. If so, we can always pay some doctors to make up some numbers to publish (like the fake negative HydroxyChloroquin research in the Lancet).

[UKR Editor’s note: The Lancet has now retracted the study amid much embarrassment]

First featured on UK Reloaded