IF, like me, you’ve a conspiracy theorist in the family, then you’re probably watching them shore up their belief system right now on the Infected Blood Scandal. It’s the kind of event which provides conspiracists with the philosophical bedrock for their paranoid worldview: proof yet again that our governments are out to get us. And sadly, to be honest, who can blame them? My family conspiracist believes in all sorts of wild and outrageous fantasies.
Most are harmless, but increasingly, of late, others drift towards the dangerous. My relative is entirely convinced that the human race was created by aliens, and the Bermuda Triangle is real. So what? That hurts nobody.
Covid, though, tipped them into a darker place: the pandemic was a hoax, lockdown was a totalitarian plot, and vaccines were designed to kill us. Now, I can attempt reasoned conversation with my relative, arguing that Covid was indeed very real; that lockdown may well have been badly flawed but what else could we do with the knowledge, time and resources available; and that vaccines are just medicine and while not all medicines are perfect, they’re better than nothing. But it’s to no avail.
Not only do conspiracy theorists have answers for everything - even if those answers mangle reason and fact - but they can simply point to a whole plethora of events as proof that our governments and those in authority lie to us, endanger us and then cover it up. Covid lockdowns fuelled conspiracies worldwide (Image:.
