Fear Is Profitable

Our species survived hundreds of thousands of years without a daily warning about the next existential pathogen. Now every outbreak is a potential global catastrophe, and the language of emergency has become permanent.
David Bell asks a simple question: why?

— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) June 20, 2026

… His answer is uncomfortable. What happens when fear itself becomes an economic asset? As real infectious disease mortality declines, a pandemic-preparedness industry has grown up around the endless search for new threats, and new markets.

The Infectious disease industry faces a built-in market failure. An aging, heavier population guarantees a growing cardiac market. But infectious disease mortality has fallen for a century, driven by sanitation, nutrition, antibiotics, and better living conditions.

Vaccines became the bright spot: the golden egg you sell to the healthy instead of a shrinking market of the sick.
modRNA platforms now let companies print new "vaccines" in months. The catch is you still have to convince people under no real threat to buy.

Covid proved you do not need bodies in the street. You just need fear.
So you do not need a genuinely dangerous new disease, which is hard to come by. You just need something the public has never paid attention to before.

Consider the succession since Covid:
Mpox. Avian flu. Marburg. Nipah. Hantavirus. Ebola.
Combined global mortality from the entire list: under 1,000 people. Out of more than 8 billion.
Each one sold with a warning that this time it might go global.

This is the heart of it. The hype is not about a real threat. It is about market creation. Fear is profitable. The poverty, malnutrition, and diseases that actually kill millions are not. Have we built a system better at marketing fear than at measuring risk?

Read David Bell's full essay, "The Infectious Disease Frenzy," on Malone News:https://t.co/vVHgeqm75z

— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) June 20, 2026