COVID-19: The Conspiracy Theories

Investigative journalist David Gardner turns his uncompromising gaze on the many conspiracy theories connected with the COVID pandemic. With first-hand reporting and detailed investigations into the people who originated these COVID theories—some of them plausible, some driven by an agenda and some plainly mad—he answers the questions that everyone has been asking for nearly two years since the pandemic began, and left us doubting our leaders as never before. When COVID-19 struck early in 2020, first in China and inexorably through the rest of the world, it quickly became the subject of the most virulent outbreak of conspiracy theories we have ever seen. The pandemic quickly became an infodemic.

The President of the United States championed bleach as a cure, the Chinese government blamed the Americans, and the American government blamed the Chinese—a Cold War over a cold virus. David Icke said that COVID does not exist. People blamed 5G phone networks, genetically modified crops, Bill Gates, Corona beer, aliens, bats and pangolins. Yet these theorists are not all the obsessive cultists and paranoid mavericks with whom the conspiracy-theory label is often associated. They are your parents, your next-door neighbour, your boss at work. The question marks over the origins of COVID-19, the dangers of the virus. The world has been changed forever by the events of the past two years. It is crucial that history offers an accurate account of what happened. This book will play a key role in revealing what—and what not—to believe