The "Conspiracy Theorists" Were Largely Right, After All

Dec 11, 2022

One of the stories legacy media and mainstream politicians have tried to sell us is that those who profoundly distrust media, the political establishment, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, the scientific establishment, and Big Pharma, and seek out information in alternative, non-official sources, are benighted souls consumed by this or that “conspiracy theory” picked up from some self-appointed “expert” with dodgy credentials.

The Conspiracy Theory story got so big and pervasive in 2020-22 that if you pointed out lies, deception, and wrongdoing on the part of officially sanctioned actors like public health officials and Big Pharma companies, many people’s eyes would automatically glaze over, as though they were dealing with someone who had lost the plot.

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But the Conspiracy Theory story is now wearing pretty thin, as awkard facts and evidence pour in showing that many of the pandemic dissenters were largely right, all along. Their central claim - our central claim - was that powerful institutions with a massive influence over the public sphere were propping up the interests of a handful of large actors, at the expense of ordinary people’s health and life prospects.

The central claim was not that there was a single, centrally coordinated “conspiracy” against the common good, but that there was an unhappy convergence of elite interests around a particular narrative, that was extremely destructive to society at large.

A series of ill-advised and reckless societal interventions were legitimated by a simplistic narrative that was plugged incessantly by Big Government, Big Media, and Big Pharma. And anyone who spoke out against that narrative was treated as a nut-case conspiracy theorists or a “fringe epidemiologist,” and frequently censored on trumped-up “misinformation” charges.

According to the official Covid narrative, Covid-19 was a completely unprecedented disease, about which we knew almost nothing; SARS-CoV-2 was a naturally occurring virus, not a laboratory invention; Covid represented a mortal threat to society on a par with war, justifying the suspension of civil liberties; a novel vaccine conferred much more secure and robust immunity than natural exposure to the disease; locking people in their homes and shutting down hospital services would save lives; masking in public places would prove a crucial weapon against viral contagion; many cohorts of society, including health workers and educators, should be effectively coerced into taking the Covid vaccines “for the greater good”; the Covid vaccines should be given to everyone, young and old alike; the Covid vaccines were “safe and effective;” and anyone who questioned any of this was a crazy “conspiracy theorist” or “anti-vaxxer” who deserved to be shamed and silenced by all means available.

This official narrative is now falling to pieces, as more and more evidence pours in against it; while many of the claims dubbed “conspiracy theories” are looking increasingly plausible. Here are some pieces of the official Covid narrative that are now either implausible or demonstrably false:

“Covid-19 was a naturally occurring virus, not a laboratory invention.”
It is now widely recognised by scientists and public health leaders that the lab origins hypothesis is plausible and certainly cannot be dismissed, given the peculiar characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and given the sort of dangerous coronavirus research that was going on at Wuhan before the pandemic outbreak.
“The Covid vaccines are a more secure source of immunity than exposure to the disease.”
This was a pretty dubious and unsupported claim when it was made. As it turns out, the evidence from Covid test data from numerous countries, including Israel, show that people with prior exposure to Covid enjoyed equal and quite possibly superior immunity to people who were vaccinated against Covid-19.
“Locking people in their homes and shutting down hospital services will save lives.”
Numerous public health experts and commentators, including Prof. Jay Bhattacharya, pointed out the major societal risks associated with lockdowns, and called for “focused protection” of high risk populations as a less destructive approach than indiscriminate lockdowns. The so-called “conspiracy theorists” who opposed lockdowns were actually dead right: locked-down societies did not perform better in the pandemic than lockdown-free societies like Florida and Sweden. Furthermore, we are now seeing a major increase in mortality across much of the West, a large part of which is not Covid-related. The most obvious explanation is that the disruptions caused by lockdowns reduced the quality of healthcare and other services, inflicting a range of collateral harms on psychological and physical health.
“Masking in public places will prove a critical weapon against viral contagion.”
The empirical evidence for this proposition was always weak, at best. The evidence reported by WHO, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and Coughran, among other bodies, remains mixed and inconclusive at best on the efficacy of masking in the community. There is no identifiable correlation between high levels of masking and low levels of viral transmission; or low levels of masking and high levels of viral transmission. It looks like the “anti-masking” “conspiracy theorists” were right after all.
“The Covid vaccines are safe and effective; anyone who says otherwise is an ill-informed anti-vaxxer.”
The problem with this proposition is that by definition, it was impossible, based on the initial trials, to know for sure what the impact of a novel vaccine would be on a much larger population; as it was impossible to know with any degree of certainty what the impact of a novel vaccine would be two years, three years, five years, or ten years down the road.
If the vaccines had been so incredibly “safe and effective,” the pharmaceutical companies would not have needed to seek exemption from liability for vaccine harms; and we would not be seeing a large number of studies demonstrating a worryingly high incidence of myocarditis post-vaccination in young men, as recognised by Florida’s Surgeon-General, among others.

Failing to advert to the risks associated with the Covid vaccines was most decidedly not an innocent mistake. The “safe and effective” label was disingenuous and fundamentally dishonest. The public should have been informed about the uncertainties surrounding these novel vaccines; instead they were told not to worry their pretty little heads. Once again, it looks like the “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers” who urged caution were right, after all.

So next time a body of criticisms of mainstream science and policy is dismissed as the rantings of “conspiracy theorists,” let’s take a closer look and see where the evidence actually points.

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