Kim Kardashian and lesser-known oxygen thieves are wowed by this prediction Sylvia Browne made in 2008: “Around 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…is that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived.”

While Kardashian and the others consider this a reference to the coronavirus, the evidence fails to support the weight of such a claim. First, the illness, as Benjamin Radford of the Center of Inquiry wrote, is not “a severe pneumonia-like illness.” Instead, 80 percent of patients have mild symptoms and the morality rate hovers at three percent.

Second, the assertion that COVID-19 resists all known treatments is an inaccurate descriptor of the virus. Radford notes that doctors know how to treat the symptoms, they just don’t yet have a cure. A third Browne misfire is that the virus will vanish as quickly as it appeared.

Browne made other claims about global viruses and each prognostication increases the chance that at least one of them will seem to be correct. Four years prior to the prophecy that has proponents excited, Browne shared a similar vision. In the earlier soothsaying, she wrote, “By 2020 we’ll see more people than ever wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves in public, inspired by an outbreak of a severe pneumonia-like illness that attacks both the lungs and the bronchial tubes and is ruthlessly resistant to treatment. This illness will be particularly baffling in that, after causing a winter of absolute panic, it will seem to vanish completely.”

Again, multiple guesses like this increases the chances that one version of the prediction will seem to score a hit. Followers decide which one is closest to reality and forget about the others.

For instance, one part of the prophecy trimmed from the 2008 book was that the disease’s source and cure would by unknown. Yet, the source has been identified as a food market in Wuhan, China. Obvious misses like this are why Browne’s followers are posting her 2008 prophecy and not the earlier version. Proponents have seized on the more correct version and ignored or rationalized away the earlier prediction.

As to a cure, Radford writes that, “Viruses themselves can’t be cured, though the diseases they lead to can be prevented with vaccination. Like the common cold, influenza, and most other contagious respiratory illnesses, people are ‘cured’ of Covid-19 when they recover from it.”

There’s also the matter of visions that aren’t just fuzzy, but completely obscured. In the same book Kardashian raves about, Browne prophesied that by now there we be cures for AIDS and the common cold, telemarketing would be extinct, humans would have made it to Mars, and that there would be flying cop cars. Only in the world of psychics would a success rate this pitiful be considered doing a good job.