ICYMI - 5G, bioweapons, Bill Gates: Why are COVID-19 conspiracy theories gaining traction?
At the end of March, in the city of Birmingham, England, a 70-foot cellular tower belonging to the mobile network operator EE Limited was deliberately set on fire by unidentified arsonists. Over the following weeks, cell towers in Belfast, Liverpool and the village of Melling were set ablaze, too, seriously jeopardizing the infrastructure of a network that provides phone service to millions — including emergency services, which are indispensable during a health crisis.
There is, of course, no merit to the argument that 5G is killing us, and certainly has nothing to do with a viral contagion of the kind the world is facing. Meanwhile, experts, politicians and spokesmen for the relevant industries have been obliged to dismiss these claims, often with justified impatience. Steve Powis, of the NHS, called them “absolute and utter rubbish.” Cabinet secretary Michael Gove called them “dangerous nonsense.
Nor is this phenomenon confined to Great Britain. A recent poll conducted by Carleton University in Ottawa found that 11 per cent of Canadians believe COVID is a 5G cover-up, and more than a quarter believe the claim that COVID was concocted as a weapon by the Chinese. A separate poll by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies found that 15 per cent of Canadians believe Bill Gates is responsible, while another 15 per cent believe COVID doesn’t actually exist.
You see a lot of this rhetoric in another realm of conspiratorial lunacy: the “flat earth” movement, whose proponents sincerely believe that our planet isn’t round but is actually a flat disc fixed in space. Flat-earthers, like COVID truthers, tend to advocate a sort of eye-opening intuition: there’s a lot of talk of “doing your own research” and looking into this or that subject on your own, meaning contrary to the advice of experts.
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