Covid and conspiracy theories

It's fair to say that we- and this includes the scientific community- know little about Covid-19. We don't quite know how it arose, we are not sure if masking and social distancing are effective and we don't how well vaccines work and what their long-term effects are. The scientific community appears divided on the subject. The particular course that nations have adopted is driven by scientists and doctors in the establishment.

Conspiracy theories abound. There is one school that believes that masks are part of the effort to simply whip up a crisis atmosphere so that the state has an excuse to curb civil liberties. Frankly, I don't know what to make of these theories. But when a respected journalist, such as Neil Clark of the UK, says that the requirement of masking is part of a conspiracy, it does make one wonder.

Clark says that those who argued thus last year were dismissed as crackpots. But masking remains very much in place:

Masks would be temporary – restricted to shops – and as soon as the Covid threat had passed they would be dispensed with, like social distancing. Anyone who said these measures were designed to be permanent – and were part of the global elite’s plan to keep the plebs muzzled up forever – was dismissed as a ‘crank’ and ‘a conspiracy theorist’.

Well, nine months on, and where are we?

The UK government has issued a ‘road map’ for taking us – with the speed of a 150-year-old Galapagos Island tortoise on sleeping tablets – out of lockdown. But there’s no mention of when masks and social distancing will be dispensed with.

Well, that could be because Covid hasn't gone away. When people said masking was temporary, they didn't know that Covid would last as long as it did.

Clark is on firmer ground when he says there were no masking requirements in the UK last March and April and masking was introduced even as deaths fell:

We shouldn’t forget that in the week that masks were first introduced last summer, deaths with Covid literally reached zero.

The BBC’s Health Correspondent Deborah Cohen asked the World Health Organisation if their change of advice on masks had been due to political lobbying, and they did not deny.

Why, if masks were so important in preventing transmission, weren’t we told to wear them last March and April? In fact, government scientists advised us not to wear them.

And why is masking becoming semi-permanent? To create a general state of fear:

If cases and deaths with Covid have plummeted to zero, but we want to make people live as if there is a permanent pandemic, to keep control over them, and to introduce ‘Covid-certification’ to restrict where they can and cannot go, how else can we keep Project Fear going without masks? It’s the only way we’d know that these were not ‘normal’ times. Which is, of course, precisely why they were introduced when deaths had dwindled to very low numbers. 

Phew! I thought that the pandemic was stressful enough without such theories.

If you want more such theories, you only need to visit the blog of Paul Craig Roberts, former Asst Treasury Secretary in the US and former Deputy Editor of Wall Street Journal. Here is a sample of websites that Roberts points to.