We are most of us living through a pandemic, but there is now a loose group, and it’s not exactly fringe, that believes in “the plandemic.”
This isn’t a virus, they say.
This is a global conspiracy to destroy our health, and control our lives.
If that sounds loopy, well sure, but without question, you have friends on Facebook who believe in some, or maybe even much of the misinformation that is today spreading faster than the virus itself, aided and abetted by a hodgepodge of anti-vaxxers and underemployed footballer wives,
The celebrity chef headcount is also curiously high.
It was fringe stuff until the weekend, when police forced to attend protests, and make arrests, in Melbourne and Sydney.
What was the genesis?
Well, last Thursday, a 26-minute clip from “The Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19” began circulating online. Billed as part one of an upcoming documentary, the clip looks slick, as well it might, given it has come out of California.
It promotes a number of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, chiefly that it’s not a serious virus, unless it is, in which case, it’s designed to force you into eating genetically modified food, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.
The celebrity chef, Pete Evans, who was recently fired from Seven – not for sharing a link to a “special light source” (or was it light sauce? That would make more sense) for the treatment for the treatment of COVID-19 but for low ratings on MKR – put a little of the Plandemic movie on his Instagram, saying: “Has anyone watched this documentary that is screening now? Would love to know your thoughts ..”
Some among his epigones responded thus:
“You need to be a critical thinker to even watch this information … Most wont as they’re research is done for them by the media and Govt whom they trust. We need more people to ask the hard questions …’
And so on, and so forth, although it must be said not all of Pete’s followers are on the same page:
“Really don’t wanna see this. I’m expecting food post or recipe,” said one.
“Pete you’re going nuts, buddy,” said another.
Also, doesn’t he have a machine to cure this thing?
In any case, the hashtag #Plandemic, was soon trending and from there it’s your classic snowball effect: people see the hashtag, and click around the social media to see what all the fuss is about, and so the story spreads.
But then both YouTube and Facebook pulled the video down.
They did so because the information contained within the clip was dangerous.
Among other things, it says wearing a face mask will increase your risk of contamination from coronavirus because it “literally activates your own virus. You’re getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions.’
This is gibberish.
What even are coronavirus expressions? Nobody knows.
The video also cautions against the washing of hands, and that, being a threat to public health, was deemed a violation of the Facebook and YouTube terms of service and so the clip was banned, but not before “plandemic” had become the most popular search term in the world.
Now, to Australia, where the first call to protest was answered outside the NSW Parliament House on Saturday.
That’s where the video of the Mum, who runs Botox business closed by COVID-19, gets separated by police from her four year old child, who was shown screaming: “Mummy’s not going, leave mummy alone!”.
Police ultimately arrested forty people, for failure to comply with a “move on” order and breaching social distancing restrictions and you can imagine how that went down: see, they were arrested for protesting the coronavirus laws, under coronavirus laws!
If you can’t see a conspiracy there, well, what’s wrong with you?
A second, larger protest was organised for Melbourne on Sunday. That’s where protesters were filmed, chanting: “Arrest Bill Gates.”
Why Bill Gates?
Because this group had “informed themselves” that he is somehow involved in spreading coronavirus in order to make vaccinations compulsory, for reasons that remain somewhat murky.
The saving of millions of lives, maybe?
Anyway, the keynote speaker in Melbourne was Fanos Panayides. You won’t perhaps know that name, but then gain, maybe you do?
He’s the author of a get-fit quick diet book called “Freedom Awaits Weight Loss Made Easy Lose Weight In The Mind and The Body will Follow.)
No?
He’s also been a contestant on a Nine reality show called Family Food Fight?
And, he told the crowd that he was just ten years old when his father told him that the government would one try to put a microchip in him.
Still no?
Okay, well, anyway, he’s now got 80,000 followers on Facebook, and if you’ve seen people smashing their TVs on Facebook, well, that’s Fanos. Some weeks back, he filmed himself laying into an innocent Panasonic, saying: “This thing has been telling us what to think. What to buy. What to eat. Who to vote for …”
Gleeful followers were soon posting videos of themselves getting stuck in to their own humble TVs with axes and hammers, before heading out to the Melbourne protest, which for the record was filmed by many of them on their mobile phones.
Same-same screen, but different?
Hashtag no irony there.
Some protesters in Victoria were also filmed chanting slogans criticising Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and demanding stay at home restrictions be lifted.
That’s quite different, from saying coronavirus is a conspiracy to kill us all, or control our minds.
Indeed, even Bill Gates understands the need for debate on that point, saying on his blog: “It is reasonable for people to ask whether the behaviour change was necessary.”
But of course, he then adds:
“Overwhelmingly, the answer is yes.”
And so cue the Mandy Rice-Davies crowd: Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?!
Because he’s behind it.
Conspiracy theorists also believe that COVID-19 is nothing more than a variant of the flu; that it won’t kill anyone that the flu wouldn’t have seen off this winter; or else (and sometimes simultaneously) that it was made in a laboratory and unleashed deliberately upon the public, as an act of bioterrorism.
The problem for those trying to combat this florescence of stupidity is that there is around the edges of any good conspiracy always a grain of truth.
Coronavirus strains have indeed been known to human beings since at least the 1960s.
They do often cause only mild illness.
Two variants (severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, in 2012,) had a higher mortality rate than COVID-19 and didn’t result in this kind of attention.
But it is wrong to say this one isn’t dangerous: it’s infected 4.2 million people and killed 280,000 of them.
But it’s also true that we don’t know really where it came from.
Scientists believe, with a high degree of confidence, that the virus jumped from animals to humans, probably at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (or wet market) in Wuhan, central China, where terrified animals – bats, rats, dogs – are caged close together, trading disease, before being butchered by humans, and eaten.
Handily for those who still see a conspiracy, the wet market is just across the Yangtze River from a high-security biosafety laboratory called the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has just about the perfect name for anyone looking for evidence of a plandemic.
The arrival of the virus roughly coincided with the launch of the 5G mobile network in Britain. In the first week of January, conspiracy theorists on social media began linking the two together, which led to the burning of 5G towers in the United Kingdom.
Others believe Chinese researchers were studying the virus in a lab when it jumped free and spread outside the lab. Australian intelligence agencies have considered the possibility but say there is no evidence to support it.
In the truly paranoid imagination, coronavirus is a cover for the child sex trade (don’t Google it; the cops will come.)
Does this mean we will soon see the founder of Microsoft arrested on bioterrorism charges, based on pressure brought to bear on the FBI by a Botox nurse and her baby outside the NSW parliament?
Probably not.
Probably we will see more people joining the conspiracy brigade. Writer David Aaronovitch tackled some of their attractions in his book, Voodoo Histories, which revisits cuckoo theories around the death of Princess Diana, and the attack on the World Trade Center.
The key problem is usually a shortage of good, factual information.
To put that another way, a lie can make its way around the world before the truth has got its pants on (Churchill said that. Or did he? No, he didn’t. But it says so online!)
It is also difficult to counter a conspiracy theory.
You could say, ‘look, that’s wrong’, but that just shows that you are part of the conspiracy. And when Facebook takes a video down, people feel like information is being suppressed.
Amusingly, some true believers have been turning up at protests in face masks.
But it’s not funny, or even funny-stupid, when violence breaks out, as it has done in the US, and threatened to do, in Australia, on the weekend.
In the US, anti-vaxxers and other protesters are spitting on health care workers, attacking police,
and refusing to take basic precautions against infection.
There has of course, also been armed resistance in the US, with citizens in open-carry states turning up with rocket launchers (their failure to social distance may be a crime, but the guns are fine.)
There have been several cases in Australia, of people spitting on police, but protests have so far been small and relatively peaceful, and since the lockdown guidelines are now being wound back, large scale protests seem unlikely.
It is, however, a bit rich for government to be complaining about the spread of misinformation, given how they themselves are routinely and enthusiastically engaged in the suppression of information that ought to be in the public domain, via the widespread corruption of our freedom of information laws. Also given their tacit endorsement of the AFP raids on media companies, and arrest of whistleblowers; and the way in which they cower before the social media behemoths, Facebook and Twitter, in their routine pullulation of conspiracy theories. And then there’s the superabundant hiring of spinners in Canberra, who currently outnumber working journalists roughly 1000 to one.
Still, if you’re heading out this weekend, it’s probably best to keep washing your hands. Because, as everyone knows, COVID-19 won’t kill itself … just like Jeffery Epstein.
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