Finding the Flu is easy, just Google it!
Discover more from Where are the numbers? by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil
Finding the Flu is easy, just Google it!
The flu supposedly vanished during the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, but internet searches for 'flu' continued as normal.
Detecting trends in searches for salient terms made on internet search engines, such as Google, has been touted as a way of better predicting and potentially managing events. One obvious application is to predict health emergencies, such as pandemics, in advance of, or as they occur. For instance, Sam Gilbert, an affiliated researcher, for the Bennet Institute of Public Policy at Cambridge University describes various ways in which he helped UK SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) use Covid-19 search data.
At a national level the use of search data is already used as a signal of flu trends. An example is the UK’s flu-detector system that tracked internet searches using Google Trends. Other countries use similar systems too.
It is therefore well established that an increase in internet searches for keywords is a reliable indicator of some spreading disease or pathogen is affecting the general public.
Given that official sources stated that the flu had vanished from many countries during their normal flu seasons in 2020/21 and 2021/22 we would expect that the frequency of internet searches by the general public would therefore have decreased significantly during those times. This is especially so given that the world was in SARS-CoV-2 panic mode and Covid-19 propaganda was in full swing.
But is this the case?
Let’s look at the Google Trends results for a number of countries, that the WHO reported, via their FluNet surveillance system, which had experienced no flu in 2020/21 and 2021/2022.
A self-explanatory red box is used to highlight areas of obvious difference between Google Trends and FluNet.
In order, we will look at: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Japan and South Korea.
UK
Google Trends
FluNet
USA
Google Trends
FluNet
Canada
Google Trends
FluNet
Australia
Google Trends
FluNet
New Zealand
Google Trends
FluNet
Sweden
Google Trends
FluNet
Japan
Google Trends
FluNet
South Korea
Google Trends
FluNet
Conclusion
Google search data for ‘flu’ shows that people were concerned enough to search for flu at the very time when flu had as reported by the WHO, scientists and national public health authorities, apparently vanished. And the public in each country performed these searches at the very time when the seasonal flu normally affects their country. This is clear across the globe, in northern hemisphere countries that experience summer flu seasons and in southern hemisphere countries with (their) winter flu seasons.
Some countries only ‘missed’ one flu season. Others missed two. Yet in all cases people in those countries searched for flu at the exact times when flu was expected.
Can the absence of flu from all of the above WHO FluNet charts be simply explained by a lack of reporting? Apart from New Zealand in 2023 (which is not red boxed) the answer to this question is a resounding no.
The WHO FluNet data is assumed to be ‘ground truth’ and relied upon as such. Many dozens of scientific research papers and hundreds of newspaper reports which have asserted or reported that flu had vanished. Scientific and health policy making have subsequently mistakenly assumed the disappearance of flu as an unquestionable fact. For example, in virology an edifice has been built to prove the idea that viral interference between flu and SARS-CoV-2 is true and, in turn, this supports the notion that Covid-19 was both novel and deadly.
All of these major mistakes are now ‘baked in’ to the historical record. At best, the public health authorities may simply be wrong, or, at worst, this discovery suggests a scale of data manipulation that cannot be explained by simple human error.
If flu was in circulation, as these internet searches appear to suggest, does this mean that some or all of the respiratory infections and deaths that were originally attributed to SARS-CoV-2 may actually have been caused by flu?
The national and international health authorities have - wittingly or unwittingly - suffered a catastrophic failure in flu detection and reporting. Either that or Google’s data cannot be trusted. I will leave it up to the reader to decide which of these options presents the most credible explanation.
See also previous articles on the missing flu.
Finding the Flu is easy, just Google it!
Fantastic digging!
I would like to contribute some information about what happened to the flu here in Germany.
My sister-in-law Marianne is working as a receptionist in a so called Sentinel-Klinik in south-west of Baden-Württemberg. A sentinel-clinic is a clinic which reports regularly to Robert Koch Institut (RKI) which is the federal authority of health. There are some 200 sentinel-clinics in Germany. On basis of these reports number of flu-cases and flu-deaths is estimated by RKI. Which ends up in quite an exact estimation.
Marianne told us in Winter 2020/21 "In former years when a patient was brought to us into our hospital who had respitorial problems we allways did a test on influenza. And we allways reported the result to RKI. This was obligatory. In this winter in case a patient arrives with respitorial problems we don't do any test on influenza. Not one!"
In other words: All of the flu-deaths in Germany have been mislabeled into corona-deaths. These deaths were urgently needed in order to fabricate the "second wave" of which people had been frightened so much. Without this trick no "second wave" of corona would have appeared and vaccine rollout would have been hampered.