Did Dean Koontz “Eyes of Darkness” predict 2019 coronavirus? Fact Check

Claims spreading online purport that the book “Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz predicted the 2019 coronavirus outbreak.

MOSTLY FALSE

The claims come attached to an image of a page of the book that discusses the “Wuhan-400” virus strain which was created outside the Chinese city of Wuhan. Later variants of this claim also attached a second image of a page which “predicts” a severe pneumonia-like illness happening in 2020. See below.

In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes and resisting known treatments.

They call the stuff Wuhan-400 because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganism created at that research center.

While the predictions may look exceptional at first glance, a closer examination shows that the coincidences are not all that impressive.

Firstly, for those that saw the later variants of this hoax that included photos of two pages (like the example above) then it should first be noted that only one of these pages – the one that discusses Wuhan-400 – actually comes from the Dean Koontz book. The other page that predicts a severe illness happening in 2020 actually comes from the book “End of Days: Predictions and prophecies about the end of the world” by Sylvia Browne.

With that noted, we look at each claim separately, since they derive from separate books.

Firstly, while it is true that Dean Koontz’s book “Eyes of Darkness” did describe a virus strain called “Wuhan-400”, the city of Wuhan (where the 2019 coronavirus outbreak originated) appears to be the only real similarity.

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In Koontz’s book, Wuhan-400 was an artificially created biological weapon, that would kill victims in less than 24 hours and had a 100% mortality rate. In the book, it was created in labs outside the city of Wuhan. The virus later gives a child in the book psychic abilities.

On the other hand, the 2019 coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak was not created as a weapon or even man-made at all, and experts believe it is a strain that mutated from animals to humans. It has an estimated 1-2% fatality rate with an incubation period lasting a number of days. It is believed to have originated inside the city of Wuhan. Needless to say, there have been no reports of the 2019 coronavirus strain giving anyone psychic powers.

What’s more, the Koontz novel was originally set in Russia, not China, and the biological weapon was originally called Gorki-400, after the name of the Russian city. It was changed to Wuhan when Koontz changed the location of his story, possibly after the fall of the Soviet Union.

As such, the only real “prediction” here is the subsequent change of the location in Koontz’s book to Wuhan, rendering this prediction a rather mild coincidence at best.

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As for the second book, book “End of Days: Predictions and prophecies about the end of the world” by Sylvia Browne, it could be argued that this book contained the more impressive coincidence, but a closer examination of this claim also renders is quite mundane.

Browne authored her prediction in 2008, a few years after the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak and a year after an Ebola outbreak in the Congo. It could be argued that predicting a vague “pneumonia-like illness” spreading across the world isn’t really a prediction as it is stating an inevitability, with the only real coincidence actually being that Browne managed to get the year correct (if we overlook the fact that this outbreak began to spread in 2019, not 2020.)

And before we begin accepting the Nostradamus-like abilities of Browne, we should also note that she also predicted in the same book that blindness will be a thing of the past by 2020 (it’s not) and that we would already have a cure for Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis by now (we don’t.)

As such, as with the presentation of all supernatural-like predictions we see online, a closer, more sceptical examination removes much of the ghostly mist to reveal a somewhat more humdrum explanation.