COVID-19: Conspiracy theories are proving to be a lot of fun

One fun part of this pandemic has been the conspiracy theories, and if you’re not involved in any, you’re missing out on a unique opportunity.

There’s the understandable concern that the vaccine is being used by corporations to place us under their control. This could be true because my mum had her first shot, and the next day she went door-to-door trying to persuade the neighbours to buy a Microsoft Word Family software package for £7.99 per month or a limited offer of £74.99 for a year.

Steve Hilton, who was David Cameron’s director of strategy, claimed the virus was created by Dr Fauci, the leading scientist in America, who is dealing with it. This must be the sort of level-headed assessment that made Cameron’s time as prime minister such a success.

During that time the strategy he directed was that Britain had run out of money, and the people who had swiped it all were the poor, turning up to collect their housing benefits in powerboats and on diamond-encrusted elephants, while the hard-working rich such as David Cameron were left to beg, so they could warm themselves by placing a couple of million in an account in Panama for the night. And Steve Hilton got away with that, so convincing us the virus was invented by Dr Fauci should be a doddle.

Desmond Swayne MP has said Britain has become a “police state”, which is a society run along the lines of the military dictatorship in Chile. It’s true – the scariest accounts from that time are the harrowing stories of students walking through the dusk in the streets of Santiago, fearfully quickening their pace as they sensed the glare of the police upon them, before hearing a chilling voice asking them to wear a mask before going into Morrisons.  

And the moment it all went wrong in the Soviet Union was when Stalin asked the peasants to stand six feet apart while watering their turnips.

The most admirable are the people who stand outside hospitals, protesting that Covid is made up. There are many issues that should be protested about, but none can be more urgent than the way medical staff are deliberately looking after people that are ill from something that doesn’t exist.

Over the centuries, many protest movements of people in regions suffering terrible hardship, such as Native Americans, or farmers in regions in which their land has been destroyed by marauding armies, have pleaded “our people are dying”. But this must be the first protest movement which has used the slogan “our people are not dying, there’s nothing wrong with them”.

Even worse, there have been so many people who have tried to warn us about this over the centuries. Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci and Rasputin all spoke out against the “Virus Masters”, and now all three of them are dead. Is that a coincidence? Wake up! Luckily, most news outlets seem to feel they should sometimes invite these people onto their programmes, for balance.

But no matter how imaginative, the theories have a major weapon. Because if you tell the country we can have herd immunity, and shake hands with infected people, and say we’ll soon have world-beating track and trace, and we’ll be back to normal in 12 weeks, and the chief adviser drove hundreds of miles because he was checking his eyesight and the magic virus respects Christmas, and the worst figures in the world makes us the best in the world and the government has done everything it possibly could, you might as well tell them it’s all made up and invented by Dr Fauci.