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Why Is Everyone Losing Their Minds to Coronavirus Conspiracies?

Wild theories about COVID-19 are spreading like wildfire. We need to make sure we are focused on reality

By Scott ColvinPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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Why Is Everyone Losing Their Minds to Coronavirus Conspiracies?
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Every year for my birthday, I receive a singular message from my aging, Scottish father. This year, turning 30 in quarantine, my inbox was inundated. Not with well wishes, but with every wild Coronavirus conspiracy going around.

You name it, I got it. The virus was a biological weapon made by the Chinese government that had accidentally escaped the lab to terrorise before its time — while confusingly also having been leaked as a contrivance to reduce the Chinese population. Or was that destablise global economies? And who was behind this mind-numbing menace, the deep state, terrorists or rogue scientists?

Who could tell? Well, as it turns out, my father and a frightening number of YouTube videos. You’ve got to watch this video, it explains everything.

I’m familiar with this corner of the Internet, and the extent to which it has been growing over the past several years, but its many tentacles and heads seem to have found a coming-of-age moment amid the pandemic. Many different but wholly normal people are now seriously discussing the coverup of millions of deaths by the Chinese government, how swilling salt water can cure the virus and the idea that new 5G radio signals are deliberately weakening immune systems to allow the Coronavirus to infect more people.

I never would have expected that all those taped episodes of The X Files in the 90s would have led us here, father. But, as they say, the truth is out there. And what truth there is seems eerily consistent between actual subject-matter experts.

The virus has features that would be impossible for humans to create artificially, and even if it were possible and the intent was to harm, more lethal viruses like Ebola exist to be so manipulated. The Chinese government, while possibly having under-disclosed cases and deaths, don’t quite have the superpowers required to deceive or keep quiet 2-3 million national and international healthcare workers, WHO representatives and others. Millions of secret deaths also misunderstand how exponential death tolls work -- if even tens or hundreds of thousands had gone unreported, the Chinese outbreak would be spiralling out of control in a way that would be even more difficult to hide.

As for 5G, microwaves of the type produced by the technology are incapable of causing harm and are produced in lower volumes than the kitchen appliance of the same name. Microwaves at household levels don’t even alter the immune systems of hamsters and mice. And the doctors haven’t forgotten to tell us about salty water, sorry.

No matter, that is exactly what they would want you to think, or so goes the gospel refrain of contemporary conspiracy mongering. But something about that seems more compelling to me than a poorly produced online video with a self-proclaimed virologist exiled from the mainstream because what he had to say was ‘too dangerous’. (Call me old fashioned.)

I’m at a loss to explain how it’s come to this. Some combination of fear, the ease of spreading information online, a general degradation of trust in public figures and institutions. It’s in there somewhere. A psychologist in the New York Times spoke about people finding agency in feeling that they have done something to solve or help the crisis.

Everyone is looking to do something while stuck inside, whether that’s baking bread, posting workouts or binge-watching the Tiger King. It’s too optimistic to hope that learning to critically appraise news and self-styled expert opinions would become a fad quarantine fun, but equally it should be hoped that falling prey to false and utter nonsense wouldn’t.

Like bad news spreading quicker than good, or lies running further than the truth, fake and misleading online materials sweep through more potently than the verified and trustworthy. Stop the spread and don’t believe everything you read online.

Let’s not lose our minds amidst everything else.

Scott Colvin is a writer and lawyer from Melbourne, Australia

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