COVID-19 is the realisation of Nostradamus' 'Great Plague'

The argument

Among the conspiracy theories that circulated during the pandemic was the claim that COVID-19 fulfils a prophecy set down by the sixteenth-century writer Nostradamus. Those who hold it regard him as an extraordinary prophet, and point to a passage in his book Les Propheties, at section 53 of the second Century, which describes a great plague coming to inflict suffering on the world. The verse also speaks of blood unjustly condemned and of a reckoning that will not cease until a death is avenged. The reading rests on two claimed correspondences. The first is that no previous event in history had been taken to match the passage, which proponents treat as evidence that it was awaiting a fulfilment still to come rather than describing something already past. The second is geographic. Nostradamus is said to have written that the plague would begin in a "Sea City", and proponents connect this to the origins attributed to COVID-19 at the Wuhan Seafood Market, in a city on a river port. Taken together, the wording and the setting are presented as a startling similarity too close to be coincidence. The claim is characteristic of prophecy interpretation generally, and its structure is what makes it unfalsifiable rather than merely unproven. The verse names no date, no disease and no place, and the identification of a "Sea City" with a particular market in a particular year is supplied entirely after the fact by the interpreter. A text of that generality can be matched to a great many events once they have happened, and cannot be used to anticipate any of them beforehand. There is no evidence connecting the passage to the pandemic beyond the resemblance proponents read into it retrospectively.

Context

(ALERT: Visit the WHO for accurate information about the coronavirus pandemic) The French, sixteenth century philosopher Nostradamus has been considered a powerful visionary who could predict the future for centuries. Some believe he accurately foresaw the fire of London, Nazi Germany, the French Revolution and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, amongst other major world events. This argument feeds into other theories that the virus was foreseen by those with the ability to predict the future in prophecy and in text, including the writer Sylvia Browne and the mystic Baba Vanga.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many of Nostradmus' so-called predictions were extremely vague writings that his supporters have spun to fit past world events. There is no evidence whatsoever of his writings accurately forecasting. His only specific prediction - "in 1727, in October, the king of Persia [shall be] captured by those of Egypt" - was never realised. Additionally, the plague Nostradamus predicted was said to originate from a seaside town. Wuhan is in central China.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The quatrains are short, allusive verses in an archaic idiom carrying no dates or place names, and the reading offered is not in the text: the lines quoted from Century 2:53 concern avenging a death, not the origin of a disease. A coming "Great Plague" is also unremarkable as a prediction in sixteenth-century Europe, where plague was recurrent — and a verse general enough to fit any epidemic will fit every epidemic, which is why these writings are read as predictions only after the event. [Rejecting P2] The correspondence fails on its own terms. Wuhan lies far inland in central China, several hundred kilometres from the sea, and a market selling seafood does not make a city a sea city; the market was an early cluster rather than an established origin, so the premise matches a reinterpreted phrase to a detail that is itself uncertain.