The crazies

Conspiracy theorists don’t really need any excuse to come up with idiotic ideas but the coronavirus has allowed them to let their imaginations run riot. So, to add to conjectures such as the landing on the moon was faked and 9/11 never really happened or was organised by the Israeli secret service, we now have the theory that the coronavirus is the result of 5G mobile telecommunications infrastructure.

It’s not much use laying out the facts to a conspiracy theorist because ‘facts’ are just part of their conspiracy – you are part of their conspiracy if you don’t believe them.  And of course these people thrive on platforms such as Facebook where all sorts of crazies spout forth opinions that have no basis in truth.

Another theory beloved by these conspiracy theorists is that the virus was made in a laboratory. Trump likes this one. But then, Trump also thinks ingesting detergent is great at protecting us from the virus.

The science that has looked at the virus is consistent in determining that it was not made in a laboratory – it came through animals – but at least this particular idea isn’t completely nuts. Although at the moment there is nothing to support the idea that the virus 'escaped' from a Wuhan laboratory, there is now support that this possibility should be further investigated – even President Biden has now ordered (May 2021) an investigation into the origins of the virus.

Whatever the results of that inquiry, the historian Peter Frankopan, who foresaw Covid-19, now predicts a man-made disaster. He points out in an article for Prospect magazine (July 2020), that the accidental release of a virus not only could happen but has done – on many occasions, in the US, the UK and Russia. And in 2014 some 2,349 vials of samples of the deadly Sars virus went missing from the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Frankopan concludes that although the solution to the natural disaster of this coronavirus will be found in our scientific laboratories, the next pandemic may well begin in one of them.

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