At a time when India is seeing the highest single-day increase in Coronavirus cases since May last year, I received a WhatsApp message that raised some pertinent questions:
Is the media coverage of the pandemic intended to settle the “trade war between China and America”?
Is the Coronavirus meant to “reduce financial markets” to prepare the stage for a bacchanalian orgy of corporate mergers and acquisitions?
Perhaps the virus has been created by pharmaceutical companies to “sell sanitizers, masks, medicine”?
The last one is my favourite. As everyone knows, the bedrock of any successful economic model is a viable and fool-proof plan to kill consumers. Nobody can deny Big Pharma wanting to profit off us, by selling us medicines. Obviously, the only way it can achieve this goal is by eliminating the people who buy the medicines. The logic is irrefutable.
Some of you may be rolling your eyes and thinking about similar WhatsApp forwards you’ve received, and ignored, over the past two years. Most of the time, I do the same. But as it happens, when I received this message I was reading an article purporting to ‘understand’ Novak Djokovic’s virulent anti-vaccine philosophy, in the backdrop of his ongoing visa fiasco in Australia. Djokovic does not seem to be a Covid-denier (at least, not publicly so) but he is certainly no fan of the Covid vaccine. In an attempt to explain why, the author of the aforesaid article proposes (unironically) that Djokovic is too healthy, too athletically superior, to accept a vaccine being injected into the rest of us mere mortals. There is, of course, no way of knowing if this is true. What’s more, it doesn’t matter. The more intriguing question to me, is how conspiracy theories and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo always attracts so many adherents across the world.
Just to be clear, I love conspiracy theories. For instance, the theory about the Queen of England (amongst other global personalities) belonging to a race of shape-shifting, world-ruling, alien lizards, is pure gold and has my unconditional support. A feeling no doubt shared by the 12 million Americans who believe this to be a genuine fact1.
According to social psychologists, people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories when they experience uncertainty and powerlessness, and feel as if they’ve lost control over their lives. I don’t know about you but I would go out on a limb and say ‘uncertainty, powerlessness and loss of control’ has sort of defined our existence in the past two years. It is scant surprise then, that we have seen a burgeoning of conspiracy theories during this time.
Some of the more popular Covid conspiracy themes are covered in the WhatsApp message I referred to earlier. Shockingly, those sound (almost) plausible when compared with other rumours:
Bill Gates funds Covid vaccine research as a means to insert microchips inside people to control them and also sterilise them. (In all honestly, I do not know if the microchip-mind control theory is connected to the sterilization theory but having grown up heeding advice to not keep my mobile phone in my trouser pockets, I will assume they are.)
Also, as a species, we seem to have a bizarre fascination with micro/nano-chips and are always imagining the unlikeliest places where they can be inserted. When the ₹2000 currency note was introduced, TV news anchors renowned for their scientific acumen and rigourous research had eloquently explained how the currency notes would have a “nano GPS chip” to make them traceable. Such revolutionary, sci-fi inspired technology must be difficult to sustain because since its introduction in 2016, the RBI didn’t print the ₹2000 note in 2019-20 and 2020-212.
Vladimir Putin’s daughter died on August 15, 2020 (!) after taking a dose of the Covid vaccine. Just the date makes me think this one may have originated in India. In fact, as per a study of online covid-related rumours and conspiracy theories (during the period December 2019 to November 2020), India was the second-most proficient country at spreading misinformation (behind the United States). So proud.
The Covid vaccine makes people magnetic.
And yet they remain friendless.
The newsreel of bizarre Covid related items is spectacularly long. An American politician recently claimed that gargling with mouthwash could protect against covid. Earlier, Donald Trump (how could he not feature in this) had wondered if injecting people with disinfectants could be the solution that had eluded doctors and scientists who were not blessed with his big brains. Closer home, some politicians in India suggested drinking gau-mutra (cow urine) to kill covid, while others believed rolling in the mud was the more sensible approach. Thaali banging was feted as a masterstroke: the clanging of utensils would produce exactly the type of vibrations that would make the virus stamp its feet and leave the country in a petulant fit. And the list goes on.
The Coronavirus has claimed millions of lives and many more have been afflicted by it. India’s official cumulative death count is around 0.5 million though some studies estimate that in reality, it could be six times that number. Yet, misinformation and ludicrous rumours about the pandemic continue being shared on social media. It has become second nature for most of us to ignore such messages and avoid engaging with the people (sometimes unknown, but often familial) who send them.
Maybe we need to change. Maybe we should make the effort to call out people spreading misinformation and ask them to stop. Maybe if one of his friends had told Djokovic that when he says things like “toxic food or the most polluted water” can turn “into the most healing water” through the “power of prayer..and gratitude”, he sounds completely loony, we would not have had to deal with the asinine ‘Novax Djocovid’ jokes3. There is no telling when this pandemic will end and if we will ever know a life without the virus. In the meantime, if each one of us can do whatever little is in our power to dispel Covid conspiracies, well, that’s as good a new year resolution as any, isn’t it?
This website compiles videos of politicians, celebrities, etc. ‘revealing’ their true reptilian forms. You have been warned.
Haters will say high-denomination currency notes which are useless for smaller cash transactions were bound to be a failure as we moved towards digital payments, but what do they know.
I don’t really mean that. I love the asinine ‘Novax Djocovid’ jokes.
Loved it. That Chinese scientists deliberately released the virus from a Wuhan lab to bring the rest of the world under their domination and, unsaid, in the process deliver massive blows to the Chinese economy with which they are grappling even today, deserved at least a honorary mention, though -:).
Whaaaat? So the Matrix isn't real?!