Including an interesting experiment with AI
Dr Joanthan Engler & Jessica Hockett PhD
Originally published to Sanity Unleashed on 28 April 2025. Republished to Wood House 76 with minor edits and a clarification on 18 August 2026.
We recently posted an article arguing that there was, when examined critically, no evidence that anything was “spreading” in spring 2020, and that all observations suggesting there was are explainable as an artifact of the rollout of mass testing, using technologies which don’t measure what we think they are measuring, and suffer from (if measuring anything useful at all) ruinous over-sensitivity and non-specificity.1
In that article, we cited this YouTube video by Dr. John Khademi.2
The video is well worth watching, but for some might be too technical.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a more digestible way of absorbing the core messages, like two people chatting about the same content that’s in the video?
So Jonathan decided to do something he’s been meaning to do for ages: experiment with Google NotebookLM, which is capable of taking a source (document, video etc) and creating a 2-person conversation about it.
You can listen to the 15 minute audio output here:
We think it did a good job keeping key points intact.
However there are some aspects of the video (also reflected in the “two-person podcast”) with which we don’t agree.
Most notably, Khademi seems to have much greater confidence in the ability to identify through testing the causes of influenza-like-illness (and deaths therefrom) than we do – or at least he did in April 2020, when the video was uploaded.
However, at its core, he’s arguing something that we both agree with:
- The rollout of mass testing into a population with an infinite number of people in which a pre-existing “something” can easily create the impression of spread. (If the “something” is what makes tests turn positive, that something WAS there for a while and widely distributed. But we make no concessions as to what that something actually was)
- Network effects (whereby someone “tests positive”, tells others who have been in contact who then decide to “get tested,” a proportion of whom will also be “positive”) constitute a powerful positive feedback loop.
- Government propaganda about the importance of such testing (remember Tedros’ “test, test, test”?) and the dangerousness of “the virus” act to augment the effect.
Though not emphasized in Khademi’s video, it is crucial not to lose sight of the fact that there is no good evidence that the testing was in any case specific for one (purported) pathogen – something Jonathan and others have written a lot about (here, for example).
It doesn’t take a genius to understand that if the testing is basically picking up the common cold, then the effect of the feedback loop – and the perception of an emergency – is magnified substantially.
- Hockett clarification for18 August 2026 republication: My view when this article was published, and remains now, is consistent with its central argument: the rollout of testing and deployment of other technologies are, by themselves, capable of casting the illusion of sudden spread. I would add that they need not have been the only mechanisms involved in creating that illusion. Data beyond death counts and SARS-CoV-2 PCR- and antibody-testing results could also have been manipulated or distorted through definitional changes, reclassification techniques, and other means, further contributing to the belief that something was happening in early 2020 that was not actually happening. ↩︎
- Hockett edit for 18 August 2026 republication: The original version of this article named “Ragnar Danneskjold” as creator of the YouTube video, which is an account operated by Dr. John Khademi. Dr. Khademi is on X under @professorakston and was Jessica’s reviewer on Setting the Stage for Flu’s Disappearing Act and co-presenter in New York City Spring 2020: Follow the Money, Nobody’s Talking for PANDA and New York City Spring 2020: Mass Casualty Event Without Proof or Explanation to Sen. Ron Johnson’s staff. ↩︎
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