Corona
Greetings, fellow manipulators and deceivers, and welcome to our course on how to create a fake pandemic! As you know from our previous courses, the first thing you need for an undertaking of this kind is to own some mainstream media. As experienced mass manipulators, we're sure you own a medium outlet or two, so let's get right into it!

Manufacturing a pandemic when there isn't any is much easier than you might think. As usual, we will need the right focus, repetition, some misdirection, semi-made-up numbers and your regular psychological tricks.

To start a fake pandemic, we need an appropriate virus. It should be something new that people know little to nothing about - that way you can tell them just about anything, and they'll know nothing to contradict your claims. Something with a scary or cool-sounding name is best. The media will love talking about it.

It can be helpful if this new virus is closely related to other viruses that are neither new nor rare. That way you can throw these into the mix whenever you need to bloat the numbers. The world of viruses is amazingly diverse, yet the common people know nothing about it, so there's always enough to choose from. I mean, most people can't tell apart a virus from a bacterium, or even a very small spider.

Perhaps the most difficult part is the right timing. You can't make up a pandemic out of literally nothing - there has to be something going on. So you may have to wait to come upon the right thing, but you are already used to this. Once you identify the right situation, it's all about making the most of it.

Once you find the right virus that's spreading at a reasonably useful rate, it's time for propaganda! Now you have to tell people about it every day with a very serious face, a sense of danger in your voice, and some well-selected and modified numbers.

For those of you with the appropriate resources, there is a bonus idea you can use. You can manufacture the virus yourself, release it secretly to another country, let them discover it, and then blame them for starting the pandemic. This will make you look a lot better than if the virus started in your own country, and it can of course be used to demonize a country of your choice, if you set it up right.

Whichever way you get the virus going, now you need to focus on numbers. People die from diseases every day, but the common population has no idea what the actual numbers are, and that's what we're counting on. And even if people hear a number, they don't know what to think of it unless you tell them. You can tell people that over half a million people die every year from the flu - which is true - but the average Joe doesn't know whether that's OK or a sign of a crisis. This he will read from your voice and your face.

So you'll have an ordinary virus, spreading at an ordinary pace, killing an ordinary number of people, but you will tell people every day that this is extraordinary, unprecedented even, show them the number of new cases every day, acting like you've discovered an alien base under your Capital city, and repeat that this is going to get worse and might reach catastrophic proportions. This has happened many times before, and people always bought it. Sure, in the end it will turn out, as it has before, that the actual number of deaths was 1% of the predicted number, but by that time you'll be distracting people with other made-up stories, so nobody will be paying attention.

Once the virus spreads to many countries, which, in today's world, is unavoidable, you have to quickly identify the one where the situation is the worst, which will happen by means of various local factors, and focus on that one the most. You will report how bad it is there every day, and imply that very soon it's going to be that bad everywhere unless people do what you tell them.

You have to convince people that this virus is worse than other viruses. They have to believe they have a higher chance to die than they had ever before. This is where you have a wide selection of handy tricks.

Usually case fatality rate is calculated from the estimated infected population. That's not what you will do with this one. You will calculate it from only confirmed cases, which will give you a much higher death rate, perhaps ten to a hundred times higher. Then you inform people that the death rate for seasonal flu is only 0.1%, which is the rate calculated from the estimated number of total cases, but you'll act like these two death rates are comparable. The death rate for flu from confirmed cases is around 10%, but people must never hear of this number! You'll tell them it's only 0.1% and this new virus has a case fatality rate of whatever you can get out of the situation.

To get a higher death rate, there are two main kinds of tricks. 1. You have to bloat the number of the deceased. 2. You have to keep the number of infected relatively low. (But high enough for people to see that this thing is spreading fast and will reach their homes any minute.)

The number of confirmed cases depends on testing and diagnosing people, so you have to think about how many people to test and whom. It's best to test the people who are the most likely to have the virus and to die from it. So test the most in areas with the already highest number of cases, which isn't even suspicious, and test mainly old and sick people. Those are the ones who will be dying the most, of course. You do not test in places where you would get few positive results. Then the case fatality rate wouldn't be scary enough.

You also need the numbers of daily new cases to rise, at least for a while. So start testing slowly, and then increase the rate of testing. The rate of confirmed cases will rise along with the rise in testing, so it will look like the virus is spreading faster than it really is. If you test 500 people today and find 50 new cases, test 1000 tomorrow, and you'll likely find about 100 cases. This doesn't mean an increase in anything other than your testing, but people will easily be convinced that today twice as many people as yesterday got infected.

You may be wondering, "But how do I bloat the number of the deceased? Aren't such records difficult to fake? Don't people keep track of that?" Not to worry! Once you convince everyone that there's a crisis, you can give this virus a special status, and when people with cancer or pneumonia die with this virus, instead of cancer or pneumonia, which would normally be the official cause of death, you'll be able to write down the name of your new virus. Since everybody will be hearing about this virus 24/7, nobody will notice that this is very unusual. So now you'll have all these sick old people dying from things that would have killed them in a few weeks or months anyway, but you'll be able to attribute the deaths to your virus. This should boost the death rate significantly.

Monitor closely everything that's happening, look for any peaks in the statistics, and focus on those. You have the whole world to choose from, so make sure you don't miss any serious cases. Of course wherever things calm down, you start ignoring the place. Since old people will be dying all the time, you must look for the rare cases of younger people dying and magnify them as much as possible.

Pay attention to discrepancies in the events in various countries. Some places will have higher death rates, usually for rather uninteresting reasons, but if you're creative, you can make up your own reasons for why it is so and gain further advantages out of the situation. We are sure you'll be able to find ways to demonize countries that need demonizing.

Once all of this is going on, you can usher in the police state of your dreams. Lock people in their homes, make them wear masks and keep a distance from each other (this will make it more difficult for them to talk about what's going on, and their main source of information will be your media), and if at all possible, make them snitch on one another. Widespread paranoia always helps. And of course, accuse those who complain of being inconsiderate and selfish etc. etc. You know the drill. Just like 9/11. Remember how we accused everyone who didn't fall in line of being unpatriotic? Worked like magic, didn't it? (Good days.)

Now, your usual danger will be the few people who are somehow always immune to our bullshit and will investigate and inevitably discover at least part of the truth and do their best to publish it. This is nothing new to you. Above all, you must keep any such voices out of the mainstream media. No statistics other than the ones you need, no comparing with other diseases (except for carefully selected ones that fit your narrative), no bringing context and perspective into this, none of the things these people always do. Bring some fake 'experts' in the media who will say whatever you tell them to, and so on.

Some scientists and doctors will try to publish papers that doubt the official narrative. These must be, as always, prevented from being published. Any incriminating content must be constantly removed from wherever possible. Our friends at Google and Facebook will help you with that.

You can also conduct some fake polls that show that the majority of the population supports the measures taken.

Restrictions put on the population will of course greatly affect the economy, but corporations will ride it out, and small businesses will fold, giving corporations even more power, which is what we want, right?

So that's about the basics of manufacturing a fake pandemic. You can monitor something perfectly normal and create the crisis in people's heads. And with the mess you'll create, a real crisis or two is bound to appear somewhere, so make sure to use it well.

Also, while you'll be distracting everyone with this 'deadly' virus, you'll have the opportunity to pull off a few dirty tricks behind everyone's back, so don't miss it!

When it's over and people start saying that it wasn't nearly as bad as you told them it would, you will tell them, as you can probably guess now, that it's because of the measures you had taken. Then you'll just distract them with some other bullshit as usual.

All right, that's it. I hope you enjoyed our presentation and that this was helpful. I'll be looking forward to seeing a good fake crisis in the near future!

Thank you all for participating.