In another case of truth is stranger than fiction, and another example of life mirroring fiction, let us consider the 1978 novel, The Stand, by Stephen King. It's a story of an epic influenza strain -- created in a lab -- that causes a worldwide pandemic and about wipes out the human race.
We should be interested in what King thinks of all this. We might not find any recent comments by him. He took down his Facebook page just before the election, saying he was not comfortable with the flood of false information allowed on it. But, among his early comments, back when the COVID-19 virus was first spreading:
"No, coronavirus is not like The Stand. It's not anywhere near as serious. It's eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions."
"Just in the last three or four weeks, people are saying to me, 'We are living in a Stephen King world,' and boy, all I can say is, I wish we weren't."
"This has been waiting in the wings for a long, long time. I wrote The Stand about a pandemic that wipes out most of the human race, and thank God this one isn't that bad, but I wrote that in 1979 and ever since then this has just been waiting to happen."
"Donald Trump: the man is an idiot. That's who we have in charge during this crisis: an idiot."
"People have been telling me for years that I sort of foresaw Donald Trump. I wrote a book called The Dead Zone, and there was a character in there, a TV comedian-type guy, who appealed to the common people, and told everybody that he was gonna solve the pollution problem 'cause he was gonna shoot it all into outer space!"
Thoughts, then, on The Stand? One is that just because a book of fiction speaks of an influenza created in a lab, that does not give credence to the thought that COVID-19 came out of a lab. If a book of fiction is your evidence, you've no evidence at all. Two, Yes, it is kind of neat that a book tells of a worldwide pandemic, and then more than 40 years later, it happens.
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