How ‘Black Fungus’ Became the Sniffles: The Evolution of the Delta Plague

The rise and fall of a media-manufactured mind virus

Only health passports can stop the runny noses caused by the Delta strain

It shuttered entire economies and put the brakes on lifting pre-existing restrictions. It was so devious and unprecedented that many governments were forced to make vaccination mandatory. Health passes and double-masking became the norm due to its unrivaled threat to public wellbeing. 

We are of course referring to the Delta strain, which is often confused with the common cold because they share the same symptoms.Does that make you feel slightly upset? That’s a Delta symptom so you should probably get tested.

It would require several large tomes to cover all aspects of this extraordinarily oversold health threat. Instead, we will examine its media-fueled rise to virus stardom, and also the mutation’s Achilles’ Heel: “almost no evidence or data backing any of this.” 

The Indian strain: a six-month-old mutation that appeared just in time

First identified in India in October 2020, the underappreciated “Indian” strain finally received the attention it deserved after the World Health Organization (WHO) listed B.1.617.2 as a “variant of interest” on April 4, 2021.

It was a curiously timed upgrade for a mutation that had already been in circulation for six months. By mid-April, it was begrudgingly accepted that the UK variant, which had provoked border closures and draconian restrictions across the globe, was not linked to more severe illness and did not lead to higher rates of death. 

The UK strain: also more deadly, until it wasn’t

The sun was setting on the “more infectious” British strain. The era of the “more transmissible” Indian strain had begun. 

Impassioned media reports began to suggest (but typically stopped short of claiming outright) that India’s homegrown six-month-old mutation was responsible for a wave of deaths in the South Asian nation. Vivid images were pumped into the minds of news consumers as a flood of stories made it appear as if India was overflowing with Covid-ravaged corpses.

Revenge of the washed-up strain

The BBC reported on May 10 that at least 40 bodies had ominously washed up on the banks of the Ganges in an area on the border of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. “It is not clear how the bodies came to be there, but local media reports suggest they may be Covid-19 victims,” the outlet said. 

Ten days later, the British broadcaster published a follow-up that left little to the imagination: “The bodies on the river banks, taken together with funeral pyres burning round-the-clock and cremation grounds running out of space, tell the story of a death toll unseen and unacknowledged in official data.”

Mysteriously, the BBC failed to disclose that funeral pyres are always burning “round-the-clock” in Uttar Pradesh: practicing Hindus often choose to be cremated so that their ashes can be spread in the Ganges. According to Wikipedia, many followers of the Hindu faith live in India.

“That’s why dead bodies are burning 24 hours a day there, seven days a week,” Newsweek reported in a 2015 article chronicling “the theater of death along the Ganges.”

“This same fire has been going for 3,000 years,” a worker at a riverside cremation in Uttar Pradesh told the outlet.

But the ancient burial rite is also pricey over 15% of the average Indian’s annual salary. “It’s why many families deposit their recently deceased directly into the Ganges or into a channel that will lead to it,” Newsweek explained six years ago. The article cited a BBC report detailing how more than 100 bodies had been retrieved from a floating mass grave in January 2015. “Many Indians regard the Ganges as holy and use its bank for cremations,” the British broadcaster noted at the time.

Dead bodies in the Ganges is a brand new thing

But there’s no mention of this 3,000-year-old Hindu tradition in the BBC’s May 2021 story. Instead, the news organization suggested that any washed-up bodies were likely connected to a brand-new fad, “the practice of cremating victims of coronavirus along the river Ganges in Uttar Pradesh.” 

Incomplete data

Beamed to television screens around the world, the harrowing tales that emerged from India in April and May were drenched in innuendo and graphic imagery, while conspicuously deficient in evidence-based analysis. The BBC’s own coverage of the Indian variant sheds light on why this might be.   

“Much of the data around the Indian variant is incomplete,” the BBC reported on May 9, around the same time that the broadcaster began documenting the never-before-seen phenomenon of dead bodies floating down the Ganges.

In the same article, the news organization spoke to a virologist who expressed serious doubt over whether the strain was uniquely infectious. “We must not panic,” the medical expert urged.

Another doctor interviewed in the piece pointed out that the Indian variant had been around since late last year, making it unlikely that it was more contagious than other mutations: “If it is driving the wave in India it has taken several months to get to this point which would suggest it’s probably less transmissible than the [British] B117 variant.”

Despite the lack of clear evidence, the innuendo-fueled narrative surrounding the Indian strain continued to pick up momentum. On May 11, the WHO upgraded the strain from a “variant of interest” to a “variant of concern.”

As unscrupulous media reports began to whip up hysteria about the strain being “more transmissible,” the BBC’s health correspondent, Nick Triggle, took a far more dispassionate approach to the issue. On May 18, Triggle penned an article that underscored that far from being an established fact, UK government scientists believed there was only a “realistic possibility” that the Indian strain was more transmissible. 

Data collected by Public Health England suggested that the variant may be “much less infectious than feared.” If you read between the lines, “a more complex picture emerges than the 50% [more contagious] figure which grabbed headlines,” Triggle concluded.

The BBC correspondent also drew attention to the fact that there is a one-week lag between “getting a positive diagnosis from a patient and establishing which variant of the virus caused it.” This creates several self-evident obstacles when trying to accurately calculate the transmissibility of a certain variant. 

A bad cold

For a time it was believed that the Indian strain could be identified by its body-ravaging properties. In early May, the BBC revealed that coronavirus patients in India were being “maimed” by “black fungus.” 

The symptoms were slightly revised a month later when the broadcaster reported that for younger people, the variant feels like “some sort of seasonal cold.”

“It might just feel like a bad cold or some funny ‘off’ feeling – but do stay at home and do get a test,” Professor Tim Spector, a purported Covid-19 symptoms specialist, told the BBC. 

Get tested even if you only feel a ‘bit funny’

Delta: the new but not improved Indian strain

At the end of May, the WHO announced that the most prevalent coronavirus variants would be assigned letters of the Greek alphabet. The newly rebranded “Delta” strain certainly sounded more serious, but in reality, it remained no more menacing than Vanilla Covid. 

The Delta strain has “potentially important” mutations that “might make it spread more easily,” the BBC reported on August 2. At the same time, “there is no evidence to indicate it causes more severe disease.”

So far there have been no reports of “black fungus” developing in Delta-susceptible Britons. Curiously, there doesn’t appear to be much evidence supporting the notion that the Delta strain inflicts unique levels of suffering upon its victims. In July, the Telegraph revealed that more than half of Covid-19 hospitalizations in England are patients who only tested positive after admission

“The figures suggest vast numbers are being classed as hospitalized by Covid when they were admitted with other ailments, with the virus picked up by routine testing,” the paper reported, citing leaked data from the NHS. 

And please scrub the Ganges plague corpses from your mind: For the past several months, the WHO has repeatedly stressed that Delta is not more deadly.

“In terms of people who are infected with this variant it has not yet translated into increased mortality,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, said while commenting on Delta during a July 30 press briefing. 

There was an attempt to ‘reboot’ Delta but the hype quickly fizzled out. In late June the world learned of a new, special edition version of the Delta strain: Delta Plus. 

The Delta strain sequel received poor reviews

The mutation “spreads more easily, binds more easily to lung cells and is potentially resistant to monoclonal antibody therapy,” the BBC said, citing India’s health ministry. 

After several days of terrifying headlines, coverage of the newly discovered sub-strain dried up. Delta Plus – even more transmissible than the “more transmissible” Delta strain – has seemingly vanished from the Earth.

The real killer

Load up the “Covid-19 dashboard” of any country, state or city, and you will likely find the following: coronavirus ‘cases’ are up while deaths linked to the virus have flattened out. This isn’t what happens when something that is “more deadly” increases in frequency.

None of this should be interpreted as denying the fact that in some parts of the world, far more people than usual are dying. But if Delta isn’t more deadly, what caused the estimated 4.9 million excess deaths reported in India over the past 15 months? 

Some have provocatively suggested that lockdowns imposed last spring by the Indian government, which deprived ten million poverty-stricken migrant workers of the ability to feed themselves and their families, may have potentially contributed to the abnormal spike in deaths.

“In India’s version of America’s Trail of Tears, workers were forced to return to their home villages, sometimes thousands of miles away. We have personally received staggering reports of millions of migrant workers from West Bengal still stranded and starving, as their work has evaporated and with it any livelihood to sustain them and their families,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, wrote in an article published on July 22. 

Like many countries around the world, India also restricted access to medical care, purportedly in a bid to “reserve” limited resources for Covid patients. The policy amounted to a death sentence for many: Hundreds of thousands of Indians suffering from tuberculosis, HIV, cancer, malaria, diabetes, and other diseases, were locked out of the country’s healthcare system.

According to one estimate, missed treatments for tuberculosis alone in the early months of India’s lockdown caused an additional 400,000 deaths from tuberculosis, not the Delta variant. 

Riley Waggaman is Anti-Empire’s Moscow Correspondent. Follow him on Twitter: @RileyWaggaman

14 Comments
  1. Sally Snyder says

    As shown in this article, the Director of the CDC recently made some very startling comments about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-effectiveness-of-covid-19-vaccines.html

    Given the pending rollout of boosters, it will be interesting to see how many times we have to roll up our sleeves to remain in compliance with the requirements of our governments’ vaccine passport rules.

    1. ken says

      “Given the pending rollout of boosters, it will be interesting to see how many times we have to roll up our sleeves…”

      “we”???

    2. Voz 0db says

      Who the fuck is “we”?

      How many times have YOU rolled up yours?

  2. ken says

    HIV is another fake disease invented by Herr Fraudci and his merry band of mad scientists at the National Institute of Hoaxes. Killed many with AZT then replaced it with another bs drug. The deaths dropped rapidly and the new drug was considered a miracle.

    Today’s Fraudci fake miracle drug is remdisivir. Does nothing but put you on a fast track to your happy hunting ground where ever that may be.

    Stages of covaids.
    Go to hospital with sniffles,,, doc declares covaids,,, put on ventilator,,, drugged,,, IV with remdisivir,,, dead,,, crematorium,,, relatives divvying up your life’s work (tearfully of course)

    Everyone happy, Big Smiles,,, mucho fed$bux in the bank,,, you in the dirt.

    Who says crime doesn’t pay!

    Another volunteer for “the miracle jab!”

    1. Mark says

      Remdesivir is yet another example of FDA approval granted in a rush before trials were even completed; the FDA is so thoroughly political it should have its own office in the White House. Perhaps it does.

      Doctor Mandeep Mehra ran a ‘study’ of hydroxychloroquine using the research facilities of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a partner of the Harvard Medical School. His research ‘revealed’ that hydroxychloroquine had no practical application against COVID. And lo and behold, it emerged that Doctor Mehra was also running a trial of Remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine’s rival, and his objective was to run interference for Big Pharma by killing off hydroxychloroquine.

      https://christianchat.com/conspiracy-corruption-discussion-forum/the-anti-hcq-conspiracy-to-promote-remdesivir.193689/

      Here’s a handy pocket reference guide to the endless lies and manipulations by Fauci.

      https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/27/anthony-fauci-40-years-of-lies-from-azt-to-remdesivir/

  3. Mr Reynard says

    After Delta I think come Gamma & so on & on until Omega & 95% of humanity is dead genocided, OMEGA !

    1. GMC says

      Check out my post and look at the order of variants Mr. R.

  4. Mark says

    Never in the long history of virology has a variant ever been more deadly than the original strain. Mutations and variants are frequently more infectious, because that’s how a virus works – it seeks to infect more hosts and to remain viable. But it does not become ‘more deadly’.

    I can’t forbear from noticing the ‘Delta strain’ arrived just in time to attack young people and even schoolchildren, who had previously been mostly out of the reach of the coronavirus, at a critical juncture when world government was looking for an excuse to sell its ‘vaccines’ to a wider audience. Suddenly, no one was safe. How convenient.

  5. GMC says

    ” At the end of May, the Who said that the most prevalent strains of the virus will be assigned letters of the Greek Alphabet “. And the WHO/DEF will make the viruses last, well past this 2023 Omega variant – according to this document. So far , in the main stream media we can see the Alfa, Delta, Lambda and the newest variant, Mu – have all made their debut.

  6. Dale says

    I like Jon Rappaport’s rejoinder to talk of variants: “Varies from what ?”

  7. yuri says

    many die from ordinary flu—usually elderly and those with chronic conditions…some flue vaccines are effective, others not….same with Covid vaccines as emerging studies suggest…a recent report perhaps at anti empire, finds Israel the most vaccinated has a lot of covid

    1. yuri says

      naturally idiots that cannot think downvote truth—-more than half in USA–nearly all stupid liberals believe astrology is scientific –“-a metaphysic for dunces” Adorno…47 -60% US adults, atheists mainly, believe in ghosts….the transference of evil onto the dead (Freud)…half of amerikans are so stupid they consider members of the opposite political party to be evil,,,,they r both the same

      1. Raptar Driver says

        Did I hurt your feelings?
        Is it normal for Cossacks to be gay and Zionist?

  8. Mr Reynard says

    Hmm We had recently the Delta variant, now I have read that there’s the Mu variant, waiting for the Ypsilon variant & then the Omega variant, last one before our death…

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