While coronavirus infects celebrities and ordinary people, entire countries are quarantined, and Russians began to slowly stock up on food, like mushrooms multiply theories about how Covid-19 came about and to whom it is beneficial.
We present you the top 10 conspiracy theories related to coronavirus.
10. Bill Gates did it
If you don’t understand how Bill Gates fits in with the coronavirus story, let's go back in October 2019. It was this month that Bill and Melinda Gates, together with the World Economic Forum and the John Hopkins Health Safety Center, held the event 201 pandemic exercise, which simulates a massive outbreak of coronavirus.
Ironically, the Covid-19 virus appeared two months after this check. Proponents of conspiracy theory believe that the program was just a prelude to the upcoming epidemic, which was jointly planned by these three organizations.
9. The bats eaten by the Chinese are to blame
According to the most common theory about the appearance of coronavirus, it all started with the seafood market in Wuhan, China. There you can buy not only seafood, but also living and dead animals, including bats - likely carriers of Covid-19.
Therefore, social media reported that the spread of the disease is to blame for the tendency of some Chinese to eat bats. This suggestion was supported by a series of viral videos showing people allegedly with the appetite of gobbling bats or soup of them.
However, there is no evidence that eating bats was a source of coronavirus outbreaks. And one of the studies completely connects the Wuhan coronavirus with snakes.
8.5G internet did it
Wuhan is one of the first Chinese cities to introduce 5G mobile Internet. And he became the first city from which the spread of the coronavirus began. "Coincidence? I don’t think! ”, Dana Ashley, one of the conspiracy therapists, tells us.
In her opinion, the Covid-19 virus was triggered by waves that emit 5G towers. Ashley based her opinion on a study in 2000 that found that the 5G network poses a risk to human health. Ashley says the so-called coronavirus is actually radiation poisoning that weakens the immune system and makes people more vulnerable to disease.
7. Pharmaceutical companies have created SARS-CoV-2
Although Runet is already full of jokes about the fact that manufacturers of toilet paper and buckwheat are negotiating the purchase of Apple and Yandex, the coronavirus epidemic has become a fertile time not only for them, but also for pharmaceutical companies.
They are obvious beneficiaries, which means they have come into the attention of supporters of conspiracy theories. One of these theories says that all the hype associated with coronavirus is deliberate panic, and its main PR customers are major players in the global pharmaceutical market.
In 2009, the world already saw something similar, then hysteria was associated with the spread of swine flu. At that time, Roche conducted a large-scale advertising campaign for the drug Tamiflu, and earned about $ 1 billion on it.
This year, the manufacturer of "Arbidol" has already announced its medicine effective against coronavirus. How much he will earn on this - who knows?
6. The Canadian government is involved
Although this theory is less popular than the version about the creation of a coronavirus in China or the USA, it has a place to be. So, we must tell you about her. The Covid-19 virus is thought to have been created at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada. In this institution, as well as in the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, deadly viruses are being studied.
Some conspiracy theorists believe that Chinese spies stole the virus and sent it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it eventually caused an epidemic.
5. The Chinese made 2019-nCov
One of the most popular conspiracy theories associated with coronavirus is that Covid-19 was created as a biological weapon and commissioned by the Chinese government.
However, then the virus “leaked” from a research laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to a breach of the security protocol.
According to another version of this rumor, the virus was studied in the laboratory (after it was detected in animals), but the end of this story completely coincides with the first option.
Some experts just laugh at the theory that coronavirus is a biological weapon. Such a weapon does not make sense, because Covid-19 does not always cause death or serious complications, and there are much more dangerous pathogens. For example, Ebola, Lassa fever, or Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, which has a mortality rate of 30 to 50 percent. For comparison: the global mortality rate of Covid-19 is about 3 percent.
4. The Americans created the Covid-19
One of the crazy theories about the origin of the coronavirus is that it was created by order of the United States government to destroy the Chinese economy. And its distributors were the American military, who arrived in China in October 2019.
I must say that Covid-19 affects all the economies of the world, including the Russian one. In it, 5 branches are most “affected” by the coronavirus.
Others attribute the Covid-19 epidemic to the fact that thousands of Americans developed lung disease last year. This was blamed on electronic cigarettes. Conspirologists think this outbreak of lung disease was just a cover for a new coronavirus.
3. The Simpsons predicted coronavirus
Adventurous "conspiratorial bloodhounds" often dig very deeply and find warnings and hints of current events in various written sources, in films and even animated series such as The Simpsons.
Since The Simpsons is one of the long-lived animated series that has remained popular for over 30 years, it’s just a storehouse of various topics for conspiracy theorists.
Case in point: Episode 21, season 4 (filmed in 1993), focuses on an outbreak of a mysterious illness called Osaka Influenza. Osaka is in Japan, not in China, but minor mistakes are excusable to the great series, right?
https://youtu.be/Gu4Ir4EoiwY
2. Dean Kunz predicted coronavirus
Coronavirus was "discovered" in the novel "Eyes of Darkness", written by science fiction writer Dean Kunz in 1981. He talks about the global epidemic caused by the Wuhan-400 virus created in a Chinese military laboratory.
However, the chorus of voices claiming that Kuntz is a prophet quickly died down when it turned out that 2020 was not mentioned at all in the novel, the lethality of the “book infection” was 100%, and the screenshot of the page that had flown across the Web was taken from the collection of prophecies of Sylvia Brown - a self-proclaimed medium and psychic. She really predicted that in 2020 there would be an outbreak of the disease, not pneumonia, but coronavirus.
In the original text of Kunz’s book, the virus was created not by the Chinese, but by the Soviet military, and was called “Gorki-400.” From the former USSR, he migrated to China, and at the same time changed his name in 2008, in a publication issued by Berkley. Americans have long known that there is a laboratory in Wuhan that studies viruses, but the USSR is no longer there, apparently because of this the virus in the book changed its registration and “name”.
1. Coronavirus flew from space
On the night of October 10-11, 2019, the sky over the northeast of China was lit up by a bright flash due to an exploding meteorite.
Proponents of conspiracy theories have not ignored this incident, and believe that the coronavirus flew to Earth from outside, from outer space. Moreover, this was not announced by any nameless British scientist, but by Professor Chandra Wickramasingh from the Buckingham Center for Astrobiology.
However, other scientists believe that this is unlikely, since the meteorite did not fall to the ground, and even if it fell, the virus would not survive the extreme landing temperature. Meteors that do not burn in the atmosphere can be heated up to 650 ° C by the time they touch the ground. This is more than enough to kill a coronavirus that cannot tolerate temperatures above 40 degrees.