When psychic Sylvia Browne wrote in a 2008 novel that a ‘severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe’ around the year 2020 little did she know how eerily prophetic it might become.
However 12 years on from the prediction, conspiracy theorists have taken to the work of fiction to find the answers and are now claiming that the author’s words ‘prophesied’ the outbreak of the coronavirus.
As the world rushes to slow down the progression of the illness, which has been declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, some claim the late self-professed psychic foresaw the virus in her book End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World.
The bizarre claims, which have taken social media by storm, were shared by reality star Kim Kardashian, 39, who posted a book excerpt to Twitter before copying it to her Instagram Stories.
In the 2008 book, Browne wrote: ‘In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.
‘Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it has arrived, attack again 10 years later, and then disappear completely.’
Theorists have been drawing attention to her description of a ‘pneumonia-like illness’ that attacks the ‘lungs and bronchial tubes’ and claimed it matches that of the respiratory illness today.
However fact-checking website Snopes.com pointed out that the SARS virus had occurred a few years before she published the book and might have inspired the passage.
Browne was best known in her lifetime for writing more than 40 books and was a frequent guest on talk shows, during which she would do psychic readings with guests or callers.
But she was nearly as infamous for her repeated false or discredited predictions.
In 2002, she claimed that the kidnapped 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck was abducted by a Latino man with dreadlocks and dark skin, but when Hornbeck was found alive in 2007, it turned out he was kidnapped by a white man.
In 2004, Browne told the mother of Amanda Berry that her kidnapped daughter was dead, going as far as to suggest her body had been disposed of in water and that DNA from the killer might be found on her jacket.
Berry’s mother died two years later, and Berry was found alive with two other abducted women.
Browne made numerous other significant errors while predicting the outcomes of abductions, and she even got the age she would die at wrong by 11 years.
The fresh claims are not the first time conspiracy theorists have said the virus, which has now been transmitted between humans in 30 countries across Europe, was foretold.