CFR-member and Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurie Garrett is the author of the 768-page “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In a World Out of Balance” (1994). In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been hailed as a prophetic work, especially as Garrett was also a consultant for the 2011 film “Contagion,” which many people see as an example of how the Hollywood-intelligence complex “preps” the public for future planned scenarios.
In my previous post, I mentioned an extraordinary error in the book, noted by an Amazon reviewer.
“She claims, in the chapter “Microbe Magnets” that there were 500,000 deaths from Cholera in NYC in 1832. Wow… that’s a horrifying number. Except it isn’t true. There were about 250,000 people living in NYC that summer, and 3215 of them succumbed to the disease. I was able to check it from multiple sources in mere moments, with the magic of the internet at my fingertips, and although I know she wouldn’t have had that in 1994, it is still an egregious error.” End Quote
If exaggerating something by nearly a 100 times wasn’t bad enough, she also made this whopper:
“The city of Strasbourg alone savagely slew 16,000 of its Jewish residents, blaming them for spreading the Black Death.”
Try as I might, I could not find any credible source for that high a figure, which gives the lie to the NY Times review that calls the book “prodigiously researched.” What Garrett seems to have done is skimmed a few articles and misread them in her haste. [Lila: I corrected a sentence referring to Garrett doing a hasty google search, which would be an anachronism.]
” Those people of Strasbourg, who had thus far escaped the plague and who thought that by killing off the Jews they would insure themselves against it in the future, were doomed to disappointment, for the pest soon struck the city and, it is said, took a toll of sixteen thousand lives.“
The pestilence (the Black Death) killed 16,000 Strasbourg Christians, after the Christians eliminated the Jews living in the town, killing anywhere between a hundred or two (according to some sources) and two thousand odd (a figure which most scholars believe to be too high):
“Closener [Lila: a contemporary historian] also gave the number of executed as 2,000 (wol uffezwei tusent alse man ahtete). Königshofen agreed with that number (der worent uf zweitusent). This total was probably high because the population of the Jews in Strasbourg was likely only 250 to 300 as has been argued earlier. Possibly, more Jews had come to the community recently to escape potential or actual persecutions in other areas of Alsace and the Empire, but it was likely that the estimate of 2,000 victims was an exaggeration. This large number may be just another example of how Medieval chroniclers were unable to deal with large figures and responded by greatly expanding them…”
200-300 deaths becomes Garrett’s 16,000, which is really the number of gentile Strasbourgians killed by the Black Death.
How can sloppy research of this kind be passed off as prize-winning scholarship, unless the prize is a signalling device indicating a thesis the power-elite find useful to their agenda?