On Thursday, Kardashian West tweeted a passage from Sylvia Browne’s 2008 book, End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World, containing an ominous prediction for the year 2020 that many people, including the reality television star, have taken as a reference to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Browne wrote: “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.”
Kardashian West’s tweet has attracted over 46,000 retweets and upwards of 235,000 likes at press time.
A spokesperson for the U.K.’s Little, Brown Book Group told Newsweek it is “having to put out an urgent reprint of the physical book to cope with the demand.”
Browne, from Kansas City, Missouri, regularly appeared on Larry King Live and The Montel Williams Show and earned $700 for 30-minute psychic readings over the phone, her obituary in The New York Times noted.
According to that obituary, many of Browne’s 40-plus books reached the New York Times’ bestsellers list, including End of Days, which was co-authored by Lindsay Harrison.
In her lifetime, Browne was frequently dismissed by skeptics, and in light of the surge of confirmed coronavirus cases around the world, the legitimacy of her so-called prediction of a pneumonia-like virus around 2020 has been scrutinized, too.
The Center for Inquiry’s Benjamin Radford heavily questioned Browne’s supposed prediction in a blog post on Thursday, concluding, “Browne has made many thousands of predictions; the fact that this one happened to possibly, maybe, be partly right is meaningless.”
Browne had been discredited numerous times in her lifetime. In 2004, she told the mother of missing child Amanda Berry that the teenager was dead. Berry was found alive in 2013, having been abducted and held captive in a house in Cleveland with two other women for a decade.
