The SPR Facebook page links to a sceptical commentary by Benjamin Radford at the Center for Inquiry about a claim that Sylvia Browne predicted the current coronavirus pandemic in this passage in a book published in 2008:
"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 arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely."
https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/sylvia...rediction/
On the whole I'm with the sceptics on this. As an article at Snopes emphasises, this may simply have been suggested by the SARS epidemic in 2003. In fact I think one point the sceptics are missing is that SARS did disappear very quickly - almost entirely over the space of 2 or 3 months. Of course it would be nice to think that this part of the prediction will be fulfilled in the case of the current pandemic, but it seems to me that Browne was probably just using past events as her source material:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sylvia...ronavirus/
"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 arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely."
https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/sylvia...rediction/
On the whole I'm with the sceptics on this. As an article at Snopes emphasises, this may simply have been suggested by the SARS epidemic in 2003. In fact I think one point the sceptics are missing is that SARS did disappear very quickly - almost entirely over the space of 2 or 3 months. Of course it would be nice to think that this part of the prediction will be fulfilled in the case of the current pandemic, but it seems to me that Browne was probably just using past events as her source material:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sylvia...ronavirus/