MITÄ LÄHIMMÄISENRAKKAUDEN ETIIKKA SANOO KORONAROKOTTEESTA?

Kansanedustaja Päivi Räsänen on nostanut Facebook-julkaisussaan esille vakavan ja ajankohtaisen aiheen: abortoitujen ihmissikiöiden hyödyntämisen rokotetutkimuksessa. Julkaisussa on lainattu Tampereen yliopiston rokotetutkimuskeskuksen johtajana huhtikuussa aloittaneen Mika Rämetin virheellistä kirjoitusta, jonka sisältö tässä oikaistaan.

Professori Rämet sanoo näkevänsä nyt Suomeen tulevien koronarokotteiden "käytön eettisesti ongelmattomana". Väite on valheellinen ja sen tueksi annetut perusteet virheellisiä ja harhaanjohtavia. Rämetin väite, että RNA-tekniikkaan perustuvien Pfizer-BioNTech ja Modernan rokotteiden suunnitteluun EI oltaisi tarvittu sikiöstä peräisin olevaa solulinjaa, on oikea emävalhe. Modernan koronarokotteen alkuperä on yrityksen tutkijoiden abortoidusta sikiöstä peräisin olevaa HEK-293 solulinjaa käyttäneessä tutkimustyössä, ja myös Pfizer-BioNTech on ilmoittanut käyttäneensä tämän saman sikiölinjan soluja oman RNA-rokotteensa suunnittelussa.

Rämet kirjoittaa lisäksi, että hänelle "eettiset arvot tutkimuksessa ja lääketieteessä ovat myös erittäin tärkeitä". Jos etiikka sallii valehtelun sikiöiden rokotetutkimuskäyttöä koskevassa asiassa, mahtaako se olla tätä korkeammalla tasolla Rämetin oman professuurin alalla kokeellisessa immunologiassa? Kysymys on ajankohtainen, sillä nyt käynnistyvässä RNA-tekniikkaan perustuvien koronarokotteiden pitkäaikaisvaikutusten tutkimuksessa olemme periaatteessa kaikki osallisina joko rokotteen ottajina tai verrokkiryhmään kuuluvina. Professori Rämet on ilmoittanut meidät vapaaehtoisiksi "koronavirusta kukistamaan" Tampereen yliopiston tiedotteella jo 6.4.2020, kauan ennen kuin mitään tietoa rokotteiden koostumuksesta, turvallisuudesta saati eettisyydestä oli saatavilla: "Voimme osallistua laajoihin kansainvälisiin tutkimuksiin hyvin nopealla aikataululla. Olemme valmiina, kun ensimmäinen koronavirusrokote tulee testattavaksi."

Lääketeollisuuden rahoittama "etiikka" hyväksyy vielä elossa olevien abortoitujen sikiöiden leikkelyn tutkimustarkoituksiin. Lääketeollisuus myös toimittaa aborttien käynnistämiseen tarvittavat kemikaalit ja maksaa taloudellisia korvauksia niitä suorittaville tahoille. Kaikki tämä on länsimaissakin täysin laillista ja jopa julkisista varoista tuettua toimintaa. Poliitikkojemme joukossa Päivi Räsänen osoittaa poikkeuksellista rohkeutta lausuessaan ääneen kysymyksen tällaisten toimien eettisyydestä.

Sikiöiden tutkimuskäyttöä puoltavana argumenttina esitetään niiden avulla kehitettyjen tuotteiden ja tekniikoiden oletettuja terveyshyötyjä. Väite on kuitenkin erittäin kyseenalainen, mistä esimerkkinä sopii hyvin tarkastella koronavirusepidemiaa: Suomessa positiivisen koronatestituloksen on saanut reilut 30 000 henkilöä, joista 506 henkeä on kuollut kuukauden sisällä koronatestistä. Kuolleista 95% on THL:n tilastojen mukaan ollut jo valmiiksi pitkäaikaissairaiksi diagnosoituja. Näin suuri osa kuolleista on siis ollut jo ennen koronatestiään lääketeollisuuden tuotteiden ja/tai palveluiden piirissä.  Niiden 5% eli noin 25 hengen kohdalta, joilta aikaisempia pitkäaikaissairauksia ei ole kirjattu, noudattavat kuolleisuusluvut positiivisen koronatestin jälkeenkin väestön normaalia kuolleisuuden tasoa, joka Suomessa on keskimäärin 1/1000 henkilöä kuukaudessa. Kaikkein pienintä kuolleisuus on niillä, jotka ovat pysyneet positiivisestä koronatuloksesta huolimatta kotonaan tai muuten poissa terveydenhuollon palvelujen piiristä: ainoastaan 1% positiivisen koronatestin jälkeen kuolleista, 3-7 henkilöä, on menehtynyt jossain muualla kuin erikoissairaanhoidossa, perusterveydenhuollon yksikössä tai sosiaalihuollon ympärivuorokautisessa yksikössä. THL:n julkaisemien lukujen mukaan positiivinen koronatestitulos ei siis kroonisesti lääkityt poislukien lisää kuolemanriskiä lainkaan, ja terveydenhuollon palveluiden piiristä pois pysyvien kohdalla positiivinen koronatestitulos jopa ennustaa kuoleman riskin alentumista!

Onko lääketeollisuudelta ja sen rahoittamilta tahoilta eettistä esittää kokeellista rokotetta universaaliksi ratkaisuksi koronakuolemiin, joita ei voida osoittaa edes olevan olemassa, jos lääketeollisuuden asiakkaana jo valmiiksi olevat pitkäaikaissairaat rajataan tilastosta pois? Ja kun luonnontieteellinen ja tilastollinen näyttö on kerta toisensa jälkeen osoittanut aikaisemmat rokotekokeilut terveydelle vahingollisiksi, onko tällaisessa tilanteessa perusteltua altistaa väestö jälleen yhdelle kokeilulle? Ei tietenkään, mutta moni on silti valmis tarttumaan lääketeollisuuden tarjoamaan oljenkorteen sen toivossa, että rokotteella voisi omaa tai pitkäaikaissairaan omaisen tai tuttavan poismenon hetkeä lykätä hieman tuonnemmaksi. Tällainen ajattelutapa kuitenkin sortuu kuin korttitalo, kun lääketeollisuuden piirissä todellisuudessa vallitseva piittaamattomuus ihmishengistä tulee päivänvaloon. Siksi meidän, joiden toimia ohjaa ihmiselämän kunnioittaminen ja suojeleminen, on syytä nyt nostaa voimallisesti esille kysymys koronarokotteen vastaanottamisen eettisyydestä.

Bowling for Pfizer: Who’s Behind the BioNTech Vaccine?

From Development to Approval

When it was revealed, at the end of November, that the Oxford Vaccine Group had conducted the clinical trial showing its vaccine for COVID-19 had an efficacy of 90 per cent on volunteers aged 55 and below, thereby excluding precisely the demographic most at risk from the disease, shares in its business partner, the British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, dropped 6 per cent in one week, and the race to be the first to release a vaccine on the world was back on. This has since been won by the US multinational Pfizer, by revenue the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Like GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Roche, Sanofi and the other 23 companies working on coronavirus treatments and vaccines back in May, Pfizer had begun tests for a vaccine developed by the German biotechnology company, BioNTech. In July, Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, stated that companies in the private sector producing a vaccine for COVID-19 should make a profit, and dismissed suggestions they shouldn’t as ‘fanatic’ and ‘radical’. That same month, trials on the BioNTech vaccine were fast-tracked by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Pfizer agreed a $1.95 billion deal with the US Government to produce 100 million doses. The US deal priced the two-dose course at $39, and Pfizer stated that it would not lower the rates for other developed countries until coronavirus is no longer deemed to be a ‘pandemic’ by the World Health Organisation. In September, Pfizer announced it had agreed to supply an initial 200 million vaccine doses to the European Union, and expects to produce approximately 1.3 billion doses worldwide by the end of 2021. In October, Pfizer started testing the BioNTech vaccine on children as young as 12. In November, Pfizer claimed their vaccine is ‘95 per cent effective’, and applied to the FDA for its Emergency Use Authorisation.

This does not mean, however, that 95 out of every 100 people vaccinated will be protected from COVID-19. Pfizer conducted their clinical trial on nearly 38,000 people, took those who showed symptoms of COVID-19 within a week after the second dose, and tested them for SARS-CoV-2. Out of these, 172 had received a placebo shot, while just 9 had received the BioNTech vaccine. Although the percentage of volunteers who fell sick was tiny in both the vaccinated and placebo groups (0.04% and o.83% respectively), the relative difference between them was calculated as the vaccine’s ‘efficacy’. If there was no difference between them its efficacy would be zero; if none of the people falling sick had been vaccinated, the efficacy would be 100 per cent. In contrast, the actual effectiveness of the vaccine in real-world circumstances is very different from its efficacy rating calculated from such clinical trials. As the AstraZeneca trial of people exclusively under the age of 55 revealed, volunteers are likely to constitute a very different demographic from the people who, because of age or infirmity, are likely to need the vaccine. In the Pfizer trial, 42 per cent were over 55, and 20 per cent had at least one co-morbidity. In contrast, among the 41,600 deaths in hospitals in England attributed to COVID-19, 92 per cent were over 59 and over 95 per cent had co-morbidities. Not only that, but after the first dose was administered, the difference between those given the vaccine and those given a placebo was far lower, with 50 ‘cases’ of COVID-19 in the former and 275 in the latter, which reduced the efficacy of the vaccine to 82 per cent. Between the first and second dose the difference was even smaller again, 39 to 82, resulting in a vaccine efficacy of just 52 per cent. Moreover, given that up to 80 per cent of infections with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic, there were almost certainly far more people in Pfizer’s clinical trial who became infected after taking the vaccine. Above all, and quite incredibly given all the evidence against its accuracy and suitability for this purpose, the entire clinical trial was conduced using the RT-PCR (reverse transmission-polymerase chain reaction) test. On 27 November, the Corman-Drosten Peer Review Report, published by an international consortium of scientists in life-sciences, identified the RT-PCR test as having ‘10 major scientific flaws at the molecular and methodological level’ for detecting, identifying or diagnosing infection with SARS-CoV-2. None of this is reflected in Pfizer’s claim, which has been uncritically published around the world, of a ‘95 per cent efficacy’ for the BioNTech vaccine.

Undeterred by any of this, on 2 December the UK Government jumped the gun and approved the COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, the first country in the world to do so, even though studies of its unknown long-term effects are ongoing after just 7 months of clinical trials. Importantly, neither the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine nor those being developed by AstraZeneca and Moderna have been shown either to prevent infection or to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the population. So the Government making it a condition of lifting restrictions in the UK has, like so many of its other statements, no basis in science, and is likely to be renounced as soon as enough people have taken the vaccine to make it a condition of access to public life. Moreover, both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use new and experimental mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) technology, which encodes the viral protein spikes with synthetic genetic material, and has never been licensed for use on humans before. The instability of the Pfizer vaccine also means it must be stored at minus 70 degrees celsius, which will present a considerable challenge to the unlicensed wholesale distributors now authorised by The Human Medicines (Coronavirus and Influenza) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 to transport it. And yet, despite all these concerns and unknowns, on 8 December the unlicensed Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was released in the UK, where, following further amendments to Regulations, it can be administered by unregistered healthcare professionals, and promoted, advertised and the public informed about its use and safety by the company manufacturing it.

Pfizer Inc.

The result of this decision was immediate. From a share price of $27.48 on 23 March, the day the first lockdown was imposed in the UK, shares in Pfizer closed at $42.56 yesterday. In an interview with CNBC News back in September, Pfizer’s CEO said that anyone refusing to take the vaccine will become ‘the weak link that will allow the virus to replicate’, and assured the public that ‘we will develop our product, develop our vaccine using the highest ethical standards’. It’s an odd claim to make, even for a CEO, since Pfizer has a long history of paying out vast sums in out-of-court settlements to avoid not only claims in civil cases but prosecution on criminal charges resulting from the fraudulent promotion, unapproved prescription and injury, including death, from use of their products, as well as offering millions in payments and bribes to doctors and scientists to prescribe, test, approve and recommend them to the public. So let’s have a look at what Albert Bourla means by Pfizer’s ‘ethical standards’.

• In 1992, Pfizer agreed to pay between $165 million and $215 million to settle lawsuits arising from the fracturing of the Bjork-Shiley Convexo-Concave heart valve, which by 2012 has resulted in 663 deaths.
• In 1996, Pfizer conducted an unapproved clinical trial on 200 Nigerian children with its experimental anti-meningitis drug, Trovafloxacin, without the consent of their parents and which led to the death of 11 children from kidney failure and left dozens more disabled. In 2011, Pfizer paid just $700,000 to four families who had lost a child, and set up a $35 million fund for the disabled. This cover-up was the basis to the John Le Carré book and film, The Constant Gardener.
• In 2004, Pfizer’s subsidiary, Warner-Lambert, was fined $430 million to resolve criminal charges and civil liabilities for the fraudulent promotion of its epilepsy drug, Neurontin, paying and bribing doctors to prescribe it for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
• In 2009, Pfizer spent $25.8 million lobbying Congressional lawmakers and federal agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services. But its expenditure on federal lobbying between 2006 and 2014 came to $89.89 million. Last year it spent $11 million lobbying the federal government.
• In 2009, Pfizer set a record for the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind, paying $2.3 billion to avoid criminal and civil liability for fraudulently marketing its anti-inflammatory drug, Bextra, which had been refused approval by the FDA due to safety concerns.
• In 2009, Pfizer paid $750 million to settle 35,000 claims that its diabetes drug, Rezulin, was responsible for 63 deaths and dozens of liver failures. In 1999, a senior epidemiologist at the Food and Drug Administration warned that Rezulin was ‘one of the most dangerous drugs on the market’.
• In 2010, Pfizer was ordered to pay $142.1 million in damages for violating a federal anti-racketeering law by its fraudulent sale and marketing of Neurontin for uses not approved by the FDA, including for migraines and bi-polar disorder.
• In 2010, Pfizer admitted that, in the last 6 months of 2009 alone, it had paid $20 million to 4,500 doctors in the US for consulting and speaking on its behalf, and $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centres for clinical trials.
• In 2012, Pfizer paid $45 million to settle charges of bribing doctors and other health-care professionals employed by foreign governments in order to win business. The Chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission Enforcement Division’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit said: ‘Pfizer subsidiaries in several countries had bribery so entwined in their sales culture that they offered points and bonus programs to improperly reward foreign officials who proved to be their best customers’.
• By 2012, Pfizer had paid $1.226 billion to settle claims by nearly 10,000 women that its hormone replacement therapy drug, Prempro, caused breast cancer.
• In 2013, Pfizer agreed to pay $55 million to settle criminal charges of failing to warn patients and doctors about the risks of kidney disease, kidney injury, kidney failure and acute interstitial nephritis caused by its proton pump inhibitor, Protonix.
• In 2013, Pfizer set aside $288 million to settle claims by 2,700 people that its smoking cessation drug, Chantix, caused suicidal thoughts and severe psychological disorders. The Food and Drug Administration subsequently determined that Chantix is probably associated with a higher risk of heart attack.
• In 2013, Pfizer absolved itself of claims that its antidepressant, Effexor, caused congenital heart defects in the children of pregnant woman by arguing that the prescribing obstetrician was responsible for advising the patient about the medication’s use.
• In 2014, Pfizer paid a further $325 million to settle a lawsuit brought by health-care benefit providers who claimed the company marketed its epilepsy drug, Neurontin, for purposes unapproved by the FDA.
• In 2014, Pfizer paid $35 million to settle a law suit accusing its subsidiary of promoting the kidney transplant drug, Rapamune, for unapproved uses.
• In 2016, Pfizer was fined a record £84.2 million for overcharging the NHS for its rebranded and deregulated anti-epilepsy drug, Phenytoin, by 2,600 per cent (from £2.83 to £67.50 a capsule), increasing the cost to UK taxpayers from £2 million a year in 2012 to about £50 million in 2013.
• In May 2018, Pfizer still had 6,000 lawsuits pending against claims that its testosterone replacement therapy products cause strokes, heart attacks, pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis, and were fraudulently marketed at healthy men for uses not approved by the FDA.

Given this record of ongoing corruption and malpractice from which only its enormous profits have saved it from criminal prosecution, it seems extraordinary that Pfizer is still permitted to manufacture and sell any health care products. Yet this is the pharmaceutical company we’re being asked by the UK Government to trust with the mass vaccination of 68 million people with a product that has been rushed through clinical trials in 7 months, using an experimental technology that has never before been approved and whose side effects are still unknown, for a disease with the fatality rate of seasonal influenza, which statistically is a threat only to those over 70 years old with pre-existing medical conditions, and for which there is no evidence that it prevents infection with a virus for which only 1 per cent of the population is currently testing positive with a testing programme that has an average false positive rate of 2.3 per cent, and from which anything from 50-60 per cent of us have developed or already had immunity.

The Conspiracists

Of equal concern, perhaps, is who and what is promoting — if not yet advocating mandating — the taking of vaccines for COVID-19 by the entire UK population. To take just one example of the vast campaign of propaganda conducted in the lead up to the release of this vaccine — not only by the Governments of the UK, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Department of Health and Social Care, Public Health England, Scotland and Wales, the National Health Service, the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary, the First Minister of Scotland, and the Chief and Deputy Chief Medical Officers, but also by every privately-owned newspaper and media outlet in the UK — last week the Telegraph published an article titled ‘Is the COVID vaccine safe and will it work? Three experts answer your questions’. These three experts were:

• Trudie Lang, Professor of Global Health Research at the University of Oxford, who works in malaria vaccine development and sat on the Ebola vaccine safety board;
• Heidi Larson, Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project;
• Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, GP and author of MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know.

As I related in my article Bread and Circuses: Who’s Behind the Oxford Vaccine for COVID-19?, over the past decade the University of Oxford has received $208 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including $11.64 million for vaccine development over the past 3 years. But more specifically, Professor Lang’s Global Health Research programme has received $7.68 million in 2020 alone from the BMGF. Again, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has received $190 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over the past decade, $5.8 million of it this year, of which $1.5 million has been for vaccine development. But in addition, Heidi Larson’s Vaccine Confidence Project, which was given a platform on the BBC’s Newsnight programme without a declaration of its conflicts of interest, has received funding from vaccine manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, 3ie, Innovative Medicines Initiative and others.

Financial influence, of course, even from the BMGF — which a decade ago invested $10 billion in vaccines and this June invested a further $1.6 billion in Gavi, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation — isn’t in itself proof of influence over the opinions and judgements of those being funded. But in the Telegraph interview with these three ‘experts’ there are numerous examples of statements or absences that display such influence. Professor Lang, for instance, when asked about the fact that Pfizer still hasn’t published the data from its trials, responded that ‘when you submit to a regulatory body — the MHRA, the FDA or EMA — you have to send absolutely everything, the good, the bad, the whole lot’. As I reported in Bread and Circuses, the 2013 investigation by the Public Accounts Committee into the funding, withholding and selective vetting of the data for the anti-influenza drug, Tamiflu, by its manufacturer, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, regulatory bodies, including the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the WHO and the CDC, all approved, recommended and encouraged its use without having first vetted the underlying data. This is, at best, naivety or ignorance unforgivable in a designated ‘expert’ given such a platform; at worst, even more unforgivable and deliberate lying to the public. Throughout this year, doctors and scientists have been exposed for making decisions about what they think the public should know in order to ensure compliance with what they or the Government have decided in advance is the best course of action. This sounds very much like another instance of such practices; but it is not for scientists funded by global investors and manufacturers of vaccines to decide for us what information we should have before deciding what we allow in our body. Perhaps most revealingly, neither these experts nor the interviewer raises the burning question of why we need such a vaccine and to what ends.

Finally, Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick’s hysterical and contemptuous dismissal, in an article published last month in the Daily Mail, of concerns about a vaccine produced so quickly by a pharmaceutical company with Pfizer’s record of corruption, bribery and malpractice as the ‘wild conspiracy theories and political propaganda’ of ‘anti-vaxxers’ shows only that he is on the side of fear and not science, which progresses by questions not threats, smears and crude attempts to silence those who question. Since he’s written a book about it, it’s not surprising he took this chance to plug a product; but Dr. Fitzpatrick raises the case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 falsely linked the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) to autism. The Labour MP, Hilary Benn, referred to this example during the House of Commons debate on the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020, and it brought forth many a knowing smile. But Dr. Fitzpatrick says nothing, either in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, about the far more numerous instances of vaccines and other medicines that have caused injuries, disabilities and death they have caused, not least by the pharmaceutical companies competing to develop the vaccine for COVID-19, some of which I’ve listed above. In this respect, the Wakefield case is a prime example of how conspiracy theories are being used to silence valid concerns about the vaccination programme which no scientist, let alone doctor, should be dismissing with the contempt and violence Dr. Fitzpatrick shows in this article. Unfortunately, he is not alone in employing such tactics.

Reasonable Doubt

Even if all the data from the trials of all the COVID-19 vaccines was studied by individuals and institutions without the financial ties the existing ones have to the manufacturers, distributors and investors in the products they are responsible for approving before released onto the public; even if it could be proven that there was a need for such a programme of mass vaccination for a virus that the data suggests is no longer present in the  UK population in significant numbers and which presents no threat of overwhelming the capacity of the NHS to treat those few endangered by its development into COVID-19; even if the RT-PCR testing programme currently using amplification cycle thresholds far higher (typically 40, according to Public Health England guidance, but up to 45 in the World Health Organisation protocols) than that at which the test can detect infectious virus (not exceeding 30 cycles in order to be reliable) was replaced with one that proved the purported presence, spread and dangers of the virus on which the claim for the need for a vaccine for COVID-19 is based; even if pharmaceutical companies and health professionals were not indemnified against, but held liable for, civil claims and criminal prosecution resulting from the consequences of taking a vaccine they have developed, tested, manufactured, authorised, advertised, distributed and administered; even if the vaccination was not being rolled out as part of the increasingly mandatory programmes and technologies of surveillance and control that have been implemented throughout this year on the basis of combatting this virus, and which is transforming the UK into a totalitarian state ruled by Government decree; even if the vaccine was made available on a voluntary basis for the vulnerable, just like any seasonal flu jab, and not weaponised by the Government as part of its threat to maintain restrictions on our human rights and civil liberties until we take it in sufficient numbers, or to make taking it a condition of our access to public life, including work and travel, or even to enforce the vaccine on the UK population through new legislation; even if all these conditions were met — none of which are even vaguely likely in the current atmosphere of fear, all of which should be an unnegotiable requirement for any reasonable person before taking this vaccine — there would still be the question of why every Government Minister, every scientist working for Government agencies, every newspaper, every news programme, every social media platform, has for 10 months conducted a campaign of propaganda, fear, terror, slander, lies, misinformation and censorship of anyone and anything that tries to question or contradict the official line about this crisis.

If coronavirus presented anything like a threat to public health that might possibly justify the temporary restrictions that have been legislated into our lives permanently under its cloak, there would be no need for the vast shadow of deception, fabrication and manipulation that has been cast over everything to do with this crisis. Although not in itself proof — of which there is an overwhelming and irrefutable preponderance, some of which is collected in the articles below — this is, perhaps, the strongest indication that we are being lied to at a level and to an extent that, unlike the coronavirus, truly can be described as ‘unprecedented’.

Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing

Pfizer’s Experimental Covid-19 Vaccine—What You’re Not Being Told

 

The vaccine information war has kicked up a gear, and the mainstream media vultures are circling to descend on any content that they can easily label and dismiss as misinformation. Laws will be passed throughout legislatures globally to criminalise anyone who publicly misunderstands any part of the complex biological processes involved in many of the new experimental vaccine technologies that are being used to produce Covid-19 vaccine candidates.

Even now, intelligence agencies and intelligence-backed tech companies are set to deploy sophisticated methods to censor content and deplatform news websites that they view as promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ as well as ‘vaccine misinformation’, particularly as a Covid-19 vaccine candidate lurches closer to approval.

It is expected that by month’s end the mRNA vaccine produced by the scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will be approved by the US government via an emergency-use authorization, with other countries expected to follow suit. Pfizer, in anticipation of the seemingly imminent and assured approval of their vaccine candidate, has already been manufacturing hundreds of millions of doses of its vaccine for weeks and has received praise from governments and mainstream media alike for its self-reported claims that its vaccine is 90 percent effective.

In particular, the success of the experimental mRNA mass vaccination program appears to hinge on the general population being unable to effectively articulate their concerns and objections. Whilst the mainstream media are quick to point out when somebody makes an error in how they believe the mRNA vaccine works, they don’t offer any further information than the official government line. Public distrust in vaccination programs is not the fault of those who don’t understand the way this brand-new technology works. Public distrust is all-pervasive because only one side of the argument is allowed to be heard. We do need to understand the technology involved, as there is a difference between mRNA vaccines and DNA vaccines. Having a general understanding of the reason why someone should object to being given an experimental mRNA vaccine is necessary for creating a clear and coherent argument.

We are about to examine a subject that has been one of the most censored topics in the modern era. But now, more than ever before, we are in desperate need of the information that is being systematically hidden from the public. This article will be banned and attacked by those who believe we, the general public, shouldn’t know all the information about what they want to achieve from the coming mass global vaccinations. The reason for the current establishment’s unwillingness to speak about this subject leads to perhaps unnecessary suspicion. Such suspicions will never be dismissed via the currently employed tactic of smearing anyone who questions intentions. If governments worldwide want their populations to submit to these vaccinations, then they need to stop patronising people and speak honestly. However, since that is unheard of, they will continue to employ coercive tactics, as they will be trying out a never-before-approved experimental method to boost the immune system by manipulating the process our DNA uses to signal for the creation of certain proteins, and we have little idea of what the long-term impact this brand-new therapeutic technology could have on our health. No politician, medical expert, or pharmaceutical representative is willing to accept responsibility for challenges that might be around the corner.

Many of the pharmaceutical companies researching potential coronavirus vaccines are using old methods. They take a proverbial pinch of the virus and infect your immune system at a very low and slow rate, allowing your body the time it needs to build up a natural immunological resistance to the illness. But developing those types of vaccines is a slow and arduous process, and the current leaders in the race to mass global vaccination are pharmaceutical companies using a radical new method that has never been tried before.

‘They are going to hack the cells in your body in order to make them into drug factories’, says Nathan Vardi, a staff writer for Forbes, in a video titled Why Pfizer Is Betting Big on an Unproven Treatment for Covid-19, from March 2020. ‘The problem is with this approach’, Vardi admits, ‘is there’s never been an approved mRNA product’.

The various scientific explorations into the therapeutic applications of potential mRNA treatments are still in their infancy, but the method has been lauded as a potential solution to the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases, for protein replacement, and for gene therapy.

In January 2020, the de facto leader in the mRNA field was the pharmaceutical company Moderna, but—in the wake of Covid-19—other major companies began to focus on the mRNA method. Moderna was able to pioneer that method several years ago, thanks to funding largely provided by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Now, as 2020 draws to a close, the race to develop the winning Covid-19 vaccine is in full swing, and another Big Pharma company has seemingly beaten Moderna to the development of a supposedly effective mRNA vaccine, thanks to Pfizer teaming up with BioNTech, a small German company, to pip Moderna to the post. But, in this race to ‘save humanity’, there are bound to be pitfalls, especially when introducing completely new health technologies into mainstream use. Has Pfizer rung the finishing bell in this global race to end the current pandemic, or, instead, is it hurtling towards a disaster of epic proportions?

There are very informative scientific papers available from just before the pandemic began that give us an insight into this new mRNA technology. So here I’ll examine the DNA manipulating method, the vaccine, the people behind the research and development at BioNTech, but most important, I’ll examine Pfizer, and look at how the company has avoided accountability when things go wrong—and things do go wrong at Pfizer.

 

mRNA Vaccine Technology and How It Works

The vital interaction that mRNA has with our DNA has made selling mRNA vaccine technology extremely difficult for those who believe it’s the future of human medicine. The fact that it will alter the function of your DNA in your body has made many people suspicious of what unexpected horrors could arise through mass use of this new and experimental technique.

Unsurprisingly, the people marketing the vaccines have tried to downplay the aggressive and genetically manipulative nature of the treatment. In fairness, trying to explain the workings of such a complex new technology in plain English is exceedingly difficult. This is apparent when one listens to representatives of the mainstream media, who are often mealy mouthed when describing the biological processes that will take place when you receive the mRNA vaccine. But inability to articulate the technology isn’t surprising when you consider that part of your DNA, after breaking in two through a natural process, will then be combined with the experimental mRNA in a way that seems esoteric to many of us. It’s almost impossible to imagine such a process taking place in one’s own vulnerable biological system, in one’s DNA, the most precious building blocks of life that define your very existence.

After a preprogrammed strand of mRNA has merged with a naturally severed part of your DNA, it will request the production of a protein that should help trigger your immune system. In theory, this should boost your immune system and aid in the mass production of the proteins necessary to successfully fight the specific illness. The inserted messenger-RNA (thus, mRNA) should be relatively easy to design and programme as long as the scientists involved have the genetic coding for the infection it is to fight. In this case, the necessary data was released in January 2020 by the Chinese. Mild side effects to this process should be expected.

Although no extreme side effects were reported by Pfizer during the stage 3 testing of their mRNA vaccine, nearly every participant suffered mild symptoms, including swelling of the arm, irritation of the skin, and headaches, to name just a few. But, as we shall see, the information that Pfizer releases about its clinical trials and what happens in reality can be quite different.

I have just described the basic information you require for understanding how the coming mRNA vaccine works, but what I can’t describe to you is what happens in the long term. This form of therapeutic alternative has never been allowed or sanctioned before, aside from small clinical trials. There has never been an FDA-approved clinical trial for mRNA medicine because its usage comes with an abundance of ethical and moral questions and unknown possibilities.

At the same time, the utilisation of the mRNA method could also be one of the biggest leaps forward in technology ever recorded in human history. If we give the technology the benefit of the doubt and assume that it has no negative long-term side effects, then it is a potential treatment for almost every human illness on earth. Opening this mRNA floodgate would mean normalising regular vaccinations for nearly every imaginable ailment. In the best-case scenario, you could be vaccinated against cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and Alzheimer’s, and any other human ailment that derives from a fault in your DNA. In the worst-case scenario, you could be left dead or crippled like Pfizer’s victims in its experiments on Nigerian children during the late 1990s.

All that being said, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has a major downside to it. Pfizer and Moderna have stated that their mRNA vaccines need to be kept at -70° C and -20° C, respectively, which is a significant logistical challenge. Without these extremely cold temperatures, the mRNA and combined nanoparticles will lose their integrity. There are no studies on the effect of poorly stored mRNA vaccines on the human body. In comparison, DNA vaccines are much easier to transport and store as they are much more stable molecules.

As we have seen, the potential for mRNA technology is boundless. If the vaccine is successful in normalising the process of gene editing for medicinal benefit, there will be pressure to continue editing genes in other ways. It isn’t hard to see that the technology could have cosmetic, medical, and military applications that could range from phosphorescent skin to military bioweapons beyond our imagination. That is the reason why the people behind this technology are reluctant to speak about its potential game-changing mRNA method, for it represents our first real steps into transhumanism.

Pfizer’s Profitable Partnership with Germany’s BioNTech

As we have seen, Pfizer wasn’t the primary company in the mRNA business at the turn of 2020, but its immediate partnership with BioNTech saw it beat its main competitor, Moderna, to the finish line. BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, is led by a husband and wife team and, prior to the partnership with Pfizer, was dedicated to mRNA-related cancer-treatment research.

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the couple leading BioNTech, are of Turkish descent. Şahin’s family were from southern Turkey, and he studied for his doctorate in Cologne, whilst Türeci’s family came from Istanbul. The two met at the University of Hamburg.

BioNTech already had a collaboration agreement to develop mRNA‐based vaccines for prevention of influenza with Pfizer as far back as February 2019, and their commercial strategy of collaborating with selected partners paid off when the race to the coronavirus vaccine began. Since then, there has been global media interest in BioNTech, mainly in the form of puff pieces focussing on Şahin and Türeci’s romantic life. But BioNTech also has many links to other Big Pharma giants and some of the well-known movers and shakers in the medical world. As well as its partnership with Pfizer, in 2019 BioNTech also had partnership deals with Bayer, Genentech, Sanofi, Genmab, Eli Lilly, Roche, and of course they received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In September 2019, just before the first people were infected with the new strain of SARS-CoV-2, the German news outlet Handelsblatt reported that ‘the Gates Foundation is investing around 50 million euros in the Mainz biotech company BioNTech. The money will be used to research HIV and tuberculosis vaccines’.

BioNTech has a small five-person management team and a four-person supervisory board. Şahin is the CEO of the company; he was also the head of the scientific advisory board of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG from 2008 until 2016, when the company was acquired by Astellas Pharma. BioNTech’s chief business officer, Sean Marett, previously worked in global strategic and regional marketing, and in sales at GlaxoSmithKline in the United States and at Pfizer Europe, as well as for Evotec and Lorantis. The company’s chief operating officer and CFO, Dr Sierk Poetting, joined BioNTech in September 2014 from Novartis. The chief strategy officer at BioNTech is Ryan Richardson, who had previously been an executive director of the global health-care investment-banking team at J. P. Morgan in London, where he advised companies in the biotech and life sciences industry on mergers and acquisitions, equity, and debt capital finances. The German BioNTech’s four-man supervisory board includes Ulrich Wandschneider, who is also a member of Trilantic Europe.

Pfizer: A Company Never Held to Account

If it were only BioNTech that was responsible for the creation of this futuristic vaccine technology, then maybe people would have more faith in the product. But Pfizer casts a dark shadow of conspiracy wherever it does business. Pfizer’s previous use of experimental drugs in secretive and scandalous studies has inspired Hollywood movies and court cases lasting over a decade, as it resulted in the death of many children. Yet, the media organisations touting its coronavirus vaccine as a heaven-sent miracle have provided little to no coverage of Pfizer’s previous experimental disasters.

Pfizer entered into the vaccine business in late 2006 by acquiring the British influenza-vaccine company PowderMed for an undisclosed fee. Pfizer was admittedly excited about the deal, stating that ‘PowderMed’s unique DNA vaccine technology is particularly promising’ and that ‘its pipeline of vaccine candidates for influenza and chronic viral diseases could have major potential’. In fact, beginning in autumn 2005, many Big Pharma companies had taken their first steps into the vaccine industry. Novartis entered the vaccine business by acquiring 56 percent of Chiron, whilst GlaxoSmithKline expanded its vaccine base by acquiring ID Biomedical of Canada. Competition was heating up among the big players, and the vaccine industry was seen as a safe bet, with reports of new vaccines selling for hundreds of dollars. But Pfizer’s reputation over the preceding decade had taken a severe knock due to the company’s disastrous experimental trials in Africa.

In 1996, an experimental trial took place in Nigeria. Under the cover of severe outbreaks of cholera, measles, and meningitis in northern Nigeria, Pfizer set up the secretive trials in Kano, the second largest city in Nigeria, to test its experimental antibiotic, Trovan (trovafloxacin). It tested the experimental drug on two hundred children. The children’s parents assumed that the children would receive the standard meningitis jab, but Pfizer staff instead set up two control groups. Half of the children were given the experimental Trovan, and the other hundred were given a reduced dosage of the leading meningitis equivalent. The lower dose was to help artificially skew the results in the favour of Trovan for marketing and competitive purposes.

In 2002, a group of Nigerian children and their legal guardians sued Pfizer in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. In court documents, the plaintiffs alleged that five children who received Trovan and six children whom Pfizer had ‘low-dosed’ had died as a result, whilst others suffered paralysis, deafness and blindness. The alleged actual number of those who died due to their involvement in the trial, per Nigerian sources, is over fifty.

Pfizer was supposed to check the children’s blood samples five days into the trials to look for any abnormalities and then change their treatment to the full-strength leading meningitis drug if there were any problems. However, they failed to do so. Instead, the Pfizer team waited for the irreversible symptoms to manifest physically before switching the treatment for the study’s unwitting participants. After realising that they had just murdered and crippled these children, Pfizer, like any giant pharmaceutical corporation would, left the scene of the crime in a hurry, failing to do any further evaluation of the patients.

Pfizer spent the next ten years denying any responsibility for the disaster, eventually releasing a statement entitled ‘Trovan, Kano State Civil Case—Statement of Defense’, in which the pharmaceutical bigwig stated among other things ‘that mortality in the patients treated by Pfizer was lower than that observed historically in African meningitis epidemics, and that no unusual side effects, unrelated to meningitis, were observed after 4 weeks’.

Pfizer eventually settled the case for $75 million on condition that it would not be held responsible for its actions. The Guardian newspaper reported in 2011 that the first four settlements in the lengthy court battle had been given to the families of four of the children who were killed during the trial. In an unabashed attempt to make the court settlement of $175,000 harder for each of the surviving families to claim, the victims’ families were forced to provide DNA samples to prove they were actually related to the deceased. This tactic turned out to be very effective from the company’s perspective, as many of the families didn’t trust Pfizer, which led some to pull out and refuse the settlement because they thought the DNA samples were a ploy by Pfizer to commit further illegal secret experiments upon them, or worse.

The Nigerians were represented by two brave lawyers, a Nigerian lawyer named Etigwe Uwo and a Connecticut-based lawyer, Richard Altschuler. According to Altschuler, it was the story of Pfizer’s Kano coverup that prompted John le Carré to write the novel The Constant Gardener that was adapted in the feature film. Like the situation depicted in the movie, Pfizer used scare tactics and smear campaigns to try and hinder any investigation into the Kano incident.

In 2006, Pfizer cut its workforce by 20 percent, reducing the number of its US employees by 2,200 people. The Financial Times reported on 29 November 2020 that this was something that was happening in all of the major pharmaceutical firms stating, ‘Big pharma is rushing to restructure across its business from manufacturing to how it markets and sells its drugs’. But Pfizer was mainly concentrating on radical change to its drugs salesforce.

Pfizer was hit by further major scandals over the following year. One included the illegal premarketing of the HIV drug Maraviroc, which initially stalled the drug’s approval by the FDA. The scandal saw Pfizer publicly fire three of its top executives, including its assistant sales manager, Kelly Fitzgerald, (who returned to work for Pfizer and is currently their assistant sales director), HIV sales director, Art Rodriguez, now working for California’s Valued Trust, and the Mid-Atlantic director, Bob Mumford.

Get Your Facts Straight and Another Way Out

Whilst a DNA vaccine will change your DNA permanently, an mRNA vaccine will not permanently change your DNA. It takes one sentence to clear up that misunderstanding of the technology, and people should not be criminalised for such a simple misunderstanding. However, the mRNA vaccine does bind with part of your DNA to alter the proteins being produced. This is the very place where companies wish to trap opponents of their experimental vaccine campaigns. Just because someone doesn’t fully understand the process involved shouldn’t mean they should be demonised and forced into taking this experimental combination of nanoparticles. In fact, individuals should reject the vaccine until companies explain how it works and if there are any long-term side effects. You shouldn’t let anybody put anything into your body until they can tell you if any long-term consequences could occur. This is a basic principle of self-preservation that trumps any risk of a virus, especially a virus that has proven to be just a little bit more deadly than the common flu.

Our bodies should be the most important concern for us all. Fundamentally speaking, all our liberties and freedoms are of little concern if we’re dead or crippled. Don’t let them shame you into giving over your precious and delicate shell to medical scientific experimentation by companies that are incapable of taking accountability for their actions. This is the core argument that you need to keep at the forefront of any debate, rather than whether your DNA is permanently changed or whether its functions are just altered. If you’re going to get into the gutter to battle out the science then you must get your facts straight. They will use any potential misunderstanding you have to wipe your voice from the debate. It is they who bear the burden of articulating clearly why we should take the vaccine; it is your right to refuse.

However, there is something no one has mentioned so far about this new mRNA technology that could give those who oppose the vaccine another way out. Normally, to be effective, a vaccine must be given to as much of the population as possible. Mass vaccination has been used historically as a synthetic herd immunity to stop the spread of a virus to the vulnerable people in our society. But this technology is different, and its method of working means it is no longer necessary to use mass vaccination.

The whole point of why mRNA vaccines are more effective than our current vaccine technologies, per its proponents, is that it precisely targets the protein-production part of your DNA’s normal life cycle. This improves the response that an individual’s immune system will have when fighting a virus. It can be targeted socially in a similar way. If the majority of people who catch Covid-19 are asymptomatic, then it’s ridiculous to give them a vaccine. Because this vaccine protects individuals in their response, there is no good reason why everybody in our society should be forced to take it. It is used to increase specific protein production in someone who’s at severe risk—that’s how a medicine works normally. You don’t take HIV medication if you don’t have HIV. You shouldn’t be taking cancer drugs unless you have cancer. And you shouldn’t need to change your DNA’s production of specific proteins unless it’s personally necessary to do so.

The biggest lie being told to the people of the world is that everybody needs to take this vaccine. And ironically, the experimental mRNA technology that they’re desperate to use makes mass vaccination unnecessary.

 

From:

 https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/11/reports/pfizers-experimental-covid-19-vaccine-what-youre-not-being-told/

James Meek · Red Pill, Blue Pill

 

In the spring​ of 2020, while the world stayed indoors to suppress Covid-19, arsonists attacked mobile phone masts in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. They set fire to nearly a hundred masts in the UK, or tried to; there were twenty attacks over the Easter weekend alone, including one on a mast serving a Birmingham hospital. The arsonists believed that the latest mobile phone technology, 5G, was the real cause of the pandemic. They imagined a worldwide conspiracy: either the unexpectedly genocidal effects of the 5G rollout were being covered up by faking a pandemic, or 5G was being used deliberately to kill huge numbers of people and help enslave whoever was left. In the actual world, 5G’s feeble radio waves aren’t capable of any of this – you’d get more radiation standing near a baby monitor – but the fire-setters are unheedful of that world.

As well as the anti-5G insurgency, the conspiracist assault on the mainstream approach to coronavirus takes the form of a suspicion of vaccination, an older concern than 5G-phobia and more of an obstacle to governments’ plans to contain the virus. But the encounter between conspiracy theory and Covid-19 isn’t as clear-cut as that. When the pandemic hit, social media, hyper-partisan broadcasters, Trump-era populism and conspiracy theory were already creating a self-contained alternative political thought space conducive to the cross-fertilisation of conspiracist ideas. Covid-19 and government efforts to control it – an extreme event, accompanied by what can seem baffling and intrusive restrictions – appear, in the conspiracist mind, as the most open moves yet by a secret group of sadistic tyrants who want to reduce the human population and enslave those who remain. The pandemic and official countermeasures are interpreted as proof, and Covid becomes the string on which any and all conspiracy theories may be threaded. Seen through the conspiracist filter, by forcing us to wear masks, by closing bars and isolating the frail elderly, by trying to terrify us over, as they see it, a dose of flu, or by microwaving us with 5G, the secret elite has shown its hand.

Now that its existence, nature and power have been proved to us, why shouldn’t we believe that the members of this group arranged 9/11? Or that Bill Gates is planning to kill us with vaccines, or inject us with nanochips hidden in vaccines, or both? Why shouldn’t the entire course of world events have been planned by a group of elite families hundreds, even thousands, of years ago? Why shouldn’t there be a link between the bounds to individual freedoms that governments have drawn up to slow climate change and the restrictions they’re carrying out in the name of beating Covid? Surely these two hoaxes are cooked up by the same firm, with the same agenda? Why, as followers of the American conspiracy theory known as QAnon insist, shouldn’t a group of politicians, tycoons and celebrities be kidnapping and torturing children on a massive scale?

A large survey in May conducted by researchers in Oxford found that only about half of English adults were free of what they termed ‘conspiracy thinking.’ Three-quarters of the population have doubts about the official explanations of the cause of the pandemic; most people think there’s at least a chance it was man-made. Almost half think it may have been deliberately engineered by China against ‘the West’. Between a fifth and a quarter are ready to blame Jews, Muslims or Bill Gates, or to give credence to the idea that ‘the elite have created the virus in order to establish a one-world government’; 21 per cent believe – a little, moderately, a lot or definitely – that 5G is to blame, about the same number who think it is ‘an alien weapon to destroy humanity’. Conspiracy beliefs, the researchers concluded, were ‘likely to be both indexes and drivers of societal corrosion ... Fringe beliefs may now be mainstream. A previously defining element that the beliefs are typically only held by a minority may require revision ... Healthy scepticism may have tipped over into a breakdown of trust.’

A friend, a BBC journalist, told me about a conversation he’d had with an acquaintance who began talking about the dangers of 5G and claimed that ‘every time a new kind of electromagnetic energy is invented, it causes a new kind of disease, like the invention of radar caused Spanish flu.’

‘But Spanish flu happened in 1918, and radar wasn’t invented till the 1930s,’ my friend said.

‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ This was uttered without a trace of a smile.

One​ Saturday afternoon in August, during the deceptive summer lull in coronavirus cases in England, I went to an anti-lockdown rally in Trafalgar Square. I heard about it from a Facebook group I’d joined. The group has a strong conspiracist slant, but most of its nearly 13,000 members (there are many similar groups) prefer to think of what they’re doing as ‘truth seeking’, hence the group’s name, Truth Seekers UK. Polls suggest that most people feel the blunt instrument of lockdown works, in the sense that it stops hospitals being overwhelmed, but it would be a weak society where nobody challenged new restrictions on individual freedom. Some enforcement of the rules, like police drones tracking hikers on moorland, has been overzealous. But the protesters at this rally weren’t interested in arguments about whether lockdowns are a mistake, or whether the enforcement of mask-wearing is pointless, or over the balance between protecting livelihoods and protecting lives. The people here believed in a malignant hidden hand behind everything that was happening and everything that has ever happened. They denied that the virus was real. For many non-conspiracists, the sight of upwards of five thousand people from all over southern England crammed together shoulder to shoulder without face masks in Central London, in defiance of the rules against large gatherings, would seem a display of selfishness provocative enough to justify its being broken up by the police. But what is democracy without political protest? And it was a genuine political protest. It was an anti-government demonstration, and the participants had sincerely held convictions. And yet the star speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.

Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a professional footballer. At a time when Britain had a handful of TV channels, everyone knew his face. Shortly before he left the BBC in 1990 he experienced a metaphysical epiphany in a newsagent’s on the Isle of Wight. Not long afterwards, via sessions with the late Betty Shine, a self-proclaimed psychic and bestselling writer of New Age books, and a transcendental episode in a storm on a hilltop in Peru, he declared he’d been chosen by a benign godlike agency as a vehicle for the revelation of truths essential to the survival of Earth and humanity. In an appearance on Terry Wogan’s chat show – notorious for Icke’s turquoise tracksuit and Wogan’s observation to his guest, about the sniggering audience, ‘They’re laughing at you, they’re not laughing with you’ – he denied claiming to be Jesus Christ, insisting he was merely the latest in a line of prophets that numbered Jesus as one of its more distinguished old boys.

That was in 1991. Since then, Icke has worked on his material and his brand, developing his following, writing books, and giving lectures and interviews around the world. Last year he was banned from entering Australia but in 2018 he was still welcomed by large audiences in municipal venues in English towns, where his fans sat peaceably as slides showed George Soros with reptilian eyes, in a corona of hellfire, with the caption: ‘George Soros: Personification of Evil.’ Covid-19 has boosted his profile. In May, following an appeal from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which pointed out that millions of people had been exposed to online material in which he blamed Jews for the pandemic, denied the reality of Covid-19, played down the infectiousness of viruses in general and lent support to 5G conspiracists, both Facebook and YouTube – though not Twitter – took down Icke’s pages. The action had no appreciable effect on his profile, except perhaps to give him the lustre of the martyr. YouTube, and YouTube wannabes like BrandNewTube, are still thick with Icke interviews by small-time videocasters. Google will point you to them. And although he has been banned from Facebook, his fans haven’t, nor have links to his material. The first thing I saw when I last checked the TruthSeekers UK Facebook group was a video interview with him. Amazon still distributes his books.

The conspiracy narrative Icke began to weave in the early 1990s is a sprawling affair that changes to follow the headlines, veers off on tangents and is full of internal inconsistencies, but some core elements remain. Icke’s story bears similarities to the influential American conspiracist text Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper (which was published at about the time Icke reinvented himself as a prophet), and to the pseudo-leaks that drive QAnon, though QAnon tends to avoid the extraterrestrial. A cursory and much rationalised summary of Icke’s conspiracy theory goes like this: thousands of years ago, a race of reptilian beings from another world drew up a marvellously slow plan for the enslavement of humanity, to be carried out by a tiny elite of either – the exact mechanism varies – human proxies of surpassing wickedness, or reptiles in human form. (‘I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath,’ Icke told the Guardian in 2006. ‘Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black.’)

The plan continues to unfold, regularly missing prophesied deadlines. Only an awakening of ordinary humans from the slumber of ignorance, prompted by heeding the truths revealed by Icke and his ilk, can save humanity. Many of the elite, according to Icke, are Jewish, and his conspiracy theory, like so many conspiracy theories, has a strongly antisemitic slant. (The word cabal, which I found myself using in the first draft of this piece, is from the classical Hebrew word qabbalah, ‘tradition’.) In his book And the Truth Shall Set You Free he says we don’t really know what happened in the Holocaust, and that ‘a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.’

There​ was no sign of Icke when I arrived in Trafalgar Square. Piers Corbyn, whose brother, the former Labour leader, can’t be held responsible for him, was speaking. Piers Corbyn is a physicist and one-time commercial meteorologist who believes that man-made climate change is a hoax. His new cause is the iniquity of lockdown. He had already been arrested several times; before the day was out he would be arrested again for helping organise the demonstration (he was later fined). He told the crowd through a scratchy sound system that Covid-19 was no worse than the flu, and was killing fewer people than lockdown. ‘Whether you believe the virus is a hoax or not, there is no justification in any terms for the Covid lockdown rules,’ he declared. The crowd had no doubt where they stood. They began to chant the title of a pseudo-documentary called Plandemic, massively popular online, in which an American scientist called Judy Mikovits tells a string of fluent lies about the pandemic: that the virus was artificially made infectious to humans in a joint effort by labs in Wuhan, North Carolina and Maryland; that Anthony Fauci, America’s Covid-19 point man, was hiding the fact that it was virtually harmless for his own financial benefit. ‘Plan-demic!’ yelled thousands in unison. ‘Plan-demic! Plan-demic!’

After Corbyn had finished, one of the organisers of the event, a suspended nurse called Kate Shemirani (she also believes Covid-19 is a hoax, but thinks its symptoms were deliberately triggered by 5G to provide the elite with an excuse to vaccinate the population with a mind-control vaccine), introduced Mark Steele, a former bouncer from Gateshead who heads an anti-5G organisation called Save Us Now. Steele told the crowd of his concerns about the harmful effects of 5G radiation, particularly on young people. In 1994, Steele was sentenced to eight years in prison for accidentally shooting a 19-year-old woman in the head, leaving her disabled, when he drunkenly fired shots from a pistol outside a pub in Newcastle.

I moved closer to the stage, feeling I stuck out. I was the only person wearing a mask. I ended up close to one of the plinths supporting the great bronze Landseer lions at the base of Nelson’s column. The stage stood between two of the lions and a group of people had climbed onto the plinth for a better view. A couple of dozen police, wearing surgical masks but no riot gear, stood a few yards from the edge of the crowd. A group of them moved towards us and began to nudge their way towards the stage. Could they be planning to shut the demo down, I wondered? They were heavily outnumbered. From the plinth, a middle-aged man with a Mohican and a T-shirt that made a reference to sex with sheep, wearing a coat tied across his chest like a Highlander’s plaid, raised his fist and began leading the crowd in a chant of ‘Shame on you!’ The police stopped. A candyfloss plume of white hair appeared and began to move past them. The crowd’s anger turned to joy. ‘David!’ came the cries. ‘David, we love you!’ The police hadn’t been getting ready to shut the demo down. They had been forming a cordon to ensure the safe delivery to the stage of David Icke.

Later,​ I emailed Dominic, a conspiracist acquaintance, to tell him I’d been at the rally. Although he knew I thought he was wrong about almost everything relating to Covid-19, he was pleased to hear I’d been in Trafalgar Square. ‘It is awesome to hear you went to the rally last week, you’ve just made me very happy!’ he wrote back. ‘So what did you think of the rally and David Icke’s speech? I regard it as a historic speech that equals many others from the past. What he says in it does actually answer a lot of the questions you have asked in your previous email.’

Icke’s speech fell far short of historic. He dwelled on his own prophetic powers and in the only memorable segment mocked the ‘fascism’ of the present moment:

Fascism justified by the illusion pandemic of Covid-19. A virus, I must give it credit, that is so well equipped for every eventuality. ‘You must not go nearer than six feet to another person to protect you from the virus.’ So now it’s got a bloody tape measure! [Applause.] ‘You must not stay with anyone outside your bubble for more than 15 minutes.’ Now it’s got a bloody watch! [Laughter.] ‘We are going to make masks mandatory but not until the end of next week.’ Now it’s got a bloody calendar! [Laughter and cheers.] Why can anyone with half a brain cell ... see that it’s a nonsense? Because they are making it up!

I knew I might scare Dominic off if I pointed out the weaknesses of Icke’s rhetoric, even if I didn’t mention antisemitism or shape-shifting lizards. But I didn’t want to patronise him by pretending to give his conspiracy theories credence. After all, he was pretty rude about people who accept the reality of Covid-19. I wrote back to him about the difference between safe distances and sell-by dates, and how needing to be a safe distance from an explosive charge doesn’t mean the charge has a measuring tape, and having to eat chicken by a certain day to avoid illness doesn’t mean the chicken has a timer. I asked him if he fancied a coffee. I haven’t heard from him since.

Earlier this year the young German journalist Alexander Eydlin wrote an article for Die Zeit about how he became a conspiracy theorist, and how he stopped being one. The latest survey by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation suggests that in Germany, as in Britain, as in the US, about half the population tends to the view that malign secret organisations are directing events. Eydlin, who describes himself as ‘a politically left-leaning secular Jew from the upper middle class with educated parents and a healthy social network’, said he had been looking for something to believe in, and was enchanted by the explicatory beauty and alternative value system outlined by his conspiracist friends. ‘Before the Enlightenment, evil was clearly located,’ he writes. ‘In the form of the devil, the satanic, it took on an understandable form and could be fought. Now we suspect that we cannot know what evil is or whether it even exists. Not everyone can bear the idea of a life that cannot be defined as unilaterally good or even just.’

Eydlin counsels against treating conspiracy theorists as political extremists: that will only make them see the concept of extremism itself as another of the lies told by the evil conspirators. Nor is there any point in trying to tear down their ideas with factual arguments, because the belief system being attacked is also an identity. ‘In the end,’ Eydlin writes, ‘I wasn’t convinced by the stubborn arguments of people who wanted to prove to me that I was wrong. Instead it was the lasting friendships with people who didn’t share my strange ideas and yet saw me as something more than just a nutcase. They argued with me, but only after they had taken the time to understand my crude ideas.’

I first met Dominic on Rye Common in Peckham, this summer. I was lounging on the grass with my family when a young man dressed neatly in jeans and a shirt, with a round, pleasant face and sleepy eyes, came up to us with a stack of leaflets. ‘Would you like to read something I’ve written?’ he asked, putting one of them into my hand, and walked off. The way he said it made me think he was handing out poetry, but when I looked at the piece of paper – four pages printed on both sides of a single sheet of A5 – I saw it was a conspiracist tract. ‘Think For Yourself ... Question “authority”’ it was headed, in red letters. On the first page was a cartoon labelled ‘LOCKDOWN’, showing Boris Johnson in a white coat, holding a syringe, standing over two masked policemen wrestling to the ground a dreadlocked protestor who’d been holding a placard reading ‘GOVERNMENT LIES’.

I skimmed the contents of the leaflet. It seemed a combination of falsehoods, misunderstandings, exaggerations and out of context snippets supporting the evil plan theory of events, all culled without attribution from the internet. I can’t remember exactly what triggered me. Was it the comparative table of deaths in different countries accompanied by the phrase ‘the media will never show you a comparison like this,’ when there can hardly be a news website, newspaper, magazine or TV news show in the world that hasn’t published multiple versions? Was it the notion that a pandemic preparedness exercise run in the US before the pandemic began was evidence that Covid-19 was planned by the evil elite, even though the organisers had issued press releases about it? Or was it that Dominic had gone to the trouble to make the misinformation pouring in from the internet seem more real by getting it printed up and hand-delivering it to us in the park, where we’d come to enjoy the simple, uncontested truth of sunshine on grass? Or was it that a close old friend had recently revealed to me his conspiracist view of the virus?

I somehow felt I had to intervene, not to change Dominic’s mind or to stop him handing out the leaflets, but simply to make him register that there was resistance to the falsehoods he was spreading. I went over to him – he was handing out his material to a large group of young people sitting on the grass – and told him off. I wasn’t eloquent. I said his leaflets were full of rubbish, and that he should destroy them. He said I should destroy my mask (nobody there was wearing one). I walked away. It was the kind of futile encounter between the self-appointed rationalist and the self-declared bearer of esoteric truths that happens online all the time, and it was no more satisfactory in the flesh. As soon as I opened my mouth I realised it was pointless to pick out this untruth or that misunderstanding in his leaflet. To treat it as amenable to critique was a category error, like scolding Ayn Rand for bad dialogue or calling out Trump for being unpresidential. I was reminded of one of the reasons it’s so difficult to argue with conspiracy theorists: you’re faced with a choice between challenging limitless errors one by one, or denouncing an entire edifice of belief, which usually means calling the conspiracy theorist mad or stupid, at which point conspiracy theory has won. It’s like a forest fire that can only be put out one square inch at a time, or all at once, and so can never be put out.

I read Dominic’s leaflet a little more carefully. It seemed even more fantastical than before, but my visceral indignation had faded. In the Trump-Brexit era the time between hearing of some new shame and accepting it has shortened. It used to take me days to work through the Kübler-Ross model over each small death of truth and honour in the public square, but I’ve got it down to half an hour now. When we bumped into Dominic by the lake I apologised for losing my temper. I told him I was thinking of writing an article about people who thought as he did. He was wary. I got his first name and an email address linked to an account on a website, lbry.tv, that he calls ‘my channel’, a collection of bootleg conspiracist books and videos with titles like ‘Your Government Wants You Dead’ and ‘The Real Science of Germs – Do Viruses Cause Disease?’ I remember naively suggesting that he read some books instead of spending so much time on the internet. What books was I thinking of? Maybe Icke’s Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race Has Controlled the Planet for Thousands of Years – And Still Does? Or the anonymously authored QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening. Free delivery with Amazon Prime.

Dominic, who I guess is in his late twenties, once read better books. In our email exchanges he told me he had a degree in psychology and a social work diploma. He never told me whether he had a day job. He dated the origin of his current state of mind to his late teens and early twenties when he had been troubled by the world’s problems and looked for their root causes. He took out a subscription to New Internationalist. He read Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Greg Palast. ‘It slowly dawned on me,’ he wrote, ‘that there could be a hidden hand behind seemingly random, unconnected events. I came to this realisation myself, long before hearing of the term “conspiracy theory” or “new world order” etc.’ He read George Monbiot and Mark Curtis and took away the lesson that whoever is in power in the US and Britain carries out the same policies.

Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse was his gateway to another world. To me – and I would have imagined before this to anyone – the works of radical social critics like Chomsky and Monbiot, eloquent, internationalist, hallowing the communal, have nothing in common with Cooper’s jittery libertarian screed, reeking of cordite and the Bible, infused with nationalist ideals of American individualism, packed with descriptions of UFOs and giving a detailed history of America’s secret dealings with alien races. And yet, to Dominic, it was ‘the missing piece of the puzzle’, introducing him to echt conspiracy totems like the New World Order, the Illuminati and the Freemasons. He was particularly taken with the chapter titled ‘Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars’. Cooper, who went on the lam to dodge tax and died in 2001 in a shoot-out with sheriff’s deputies in Apache County, Arizona, presents this as a secret Bilderberg Group policy document from 1954, outlining how the US was to be a test bed for the elite’s discovery that societies could be run like electrical networks. ‘It all made logical sense,’ Dominic wrote. ‘If you are the few and you want to control the many, you would need to form secret networks that are able to funnel down into society the agendas you formulate, which will then allow the gaining of greater power and control.’

This echoed a passage in Cooper’s book:

I cannot and will not accept the theory that long sequences of unrelated accidents determine world events. It is inconceivable that those with power and wealth would not band together with a common bond, a common interest, and a long-range plan to decide and direct the future of the world. For those with the resources, to do otherwise would be totally irresponsible. I know that I would be the first to organise a conspiracy to control the outcome of the future if I were such a person and a conspiracy did not yet exist.

The seer of conspiracies, in other words, identifies with the imaginary conspirator. The goals of the secret enslavement programme are crude because they reflect the limited imagination, and life experience, of the conspiracist. This goes against Eydlin’s claim that conspiracy theorists’ willingness to integrate contradictions disproves the notion that they’re trying to find easy explanations for complex events. ‘The contortions that many conspiracy theorists must accept in order to integrate events into their image of the world do not attest to a desire for simple explanations,’ he writes. But is this true? Conspiracists describe epiphanies where they start to see the big picture, the universal meta-conspiracy that explains and links everything. But the picture isn’t big. It’s small. It’s the result of an effort to shrink the answer to every mystery until it can fit whatever doll’s house furniture version of that answer the conspiracist is capable of holding in their head.

Maybe it’s better to see conspiracy theories as lots of small things, a box of McNuggets of folksy pseudo-information. The cure for any flaw in a conspiracy theory is to add to it. Conspiracy theories rely on sheer quantity, on feeding a limitless dole of small stimulations to whatever part of the brain hungers for secret knowledge. The appetite is never satisfied, but the plate is always full. The phrase Cooper uses to describe the conspirators’ silent weapon – ‘it shoots situations, instead of bullets’ – nicely describes conspiracist discourse, including his own. The decisive medium that feeds conspiracy theories is the shared online video clip or streamcast. Now more than ever, when mainstream broadcasters are working from home, the sprawling world of conspiracist TV is presentationally hard to distinguish from conventional TV. The archetypal conspiracist clip is more than an hour long and has an interviewer with a cheerful, reasonable-sounding manner who invites one of those with privileged access to the truth, such as David Icke, to hold forth as if he were the guest on a fawning version of a Sunday morning current affairs show.

The​ Icke style of conspiracist discourse is never lost for words or answers. It is mimicked by foot soldiers like Martin, whom I met in Trafalgar Square. Like Dominic, Martin didn’t match the cliché of conspiracy theorists as unkempt eccentrics, hippies, stoners, ragged and unbarbered and decked with badges. He was a graphic designer from Swindon, he had a degree, he was neatly and conventionally dressed; he’d recently lost his job when the pandemic forced his main client, P&O Cruises, to tie up its fleet. We spoke for about forty minutes. I peppered him with questions, but he never hesitated, acknowledged a non sequitur or expressed the slightest doubt that he saw the truth. Calmly, with a tone of stubborn and righteous annoyance such as an Englishman might use to complain about a neighbour’s plans for a new conservatory, he led me on. The New World Order planned to reduce the world population to 500 million slaves; the BBC reported the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 before it happened; the police helicopter overhead was an obvious tactic by the conspirators to drown out the rally speakers; Prescott Bush created communism and financed Nazism; apparent Covid deaths in China and Iran were organised attacks; Covid vaccines would sterilise recipients and implant tracking devices; soon everyone would be forced to have a chip implanted in their hand; the conspirators simultaneously wanted to keep their plans secret and let everyone know about them; central banks needed to be destroyed because they were creating money for themselves; the elite bloodlines of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and a few others adopted Jewish personas so they couldn’t be criticised without their detractors being accused of antisemitism; these elite bloodlines were psychotic, psychopathic and Satan-worshipping; they went back to Babylon; it was all in scripture, not that he was religious, because all religions were run by the Synagogue of Satan; the conspirators want people to be left-wing because left-wing people liked controlling governments; the gender signs on the traffic lights at Trafalgar Square showed the hand of the Illuminati at work, as did mass immigration.

I apologised for taking up so much of his time.

Conspiracist discourse is an endless tease, always promising a new layer of revelation, or a new angle. The allure doesn’t only work on those who take the conspiracy theory seriously. The sceptic gets a twisted kick out of it: the sense of wonder as each pearl drops from the master conspiracist’s mouth that there are people who believe it. The thing is, it works; it has always worked, even before the internet came along to turn conspiracism into something awfully like an epidemic in its own right. When you watch the full interview with Icke on Wogan in 1991, sure, the audience laughs, when Wogan cues them. But in between there are long stretches of absolute silence in the studio as Icke weaves his fabulations, the camera locked on his face. No doubt many thought it comic, and others cruel, but there must have been many people convinced by the performance, by this man who knew the absolute Answer and was going to spend the rest of his life being five seconds away from giving it out.

Karl Popper​ coined the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ in 1952, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies. He framed it as something that would always be singular, like game theory or chaos theory: it was only later that people started talking about ‘conspiracy theories’. The change shifted the concept in the conspiracists’ favour. To speak of conspiracy theories in the plural anchors them in the concrete, even if the person speaking thinks they’re nonsense: they’re still theories about a particular thing. Popper’s notion of conspiracy theory referred to a personal predisposition that could attach itself to anything, precisely because it was nested in the holder’s brain.

Popper saw conspiracy theory as something very old, connected to the religious impulse. ‘The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone,’ he writes. ‘The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.’ At the same time he made clear that he wasn’t denying the existence of actual conspiracies:

On the contrary, they are typical social phenomena. They become important, for example, whenever people who believe in the conspiracy theory get into power. And people who sincerely believe that they know how to make heaven on earth are most likely to adopt the conspiracy theory, and to get involved in a counter-conspiracy against non-existing conspirators. For the only explanation of their failure to produce their heaven is the evil intention of the Devil, who has a vested interest in hell.

To some this will sound like what Trump is doing now, leading a more or less open Republican conspiracy to hamper the Democrat vote in November, using as his excuse a baseless conspiracy theory about ‘vote rigging’. The darker example is the rise of the Nazis, a movement that transmitted its conspiracism to the majority of the German population, then carried through the most hideous and complex real conspiracy in history, the murder of millions of Jews.

Conspiracy theory fixes on diverse manifestations of injustice, technology and strife, on anything that’s hard to explain. That’s not to say it doesn’t have a dominant key. The othering of ethnicities or particular groups and accusations of Satanism or child abuse are frequent markers of conspiracies, but they all have in common an anarchic, nihilistic libertarianism that takes government as its ultimate enemy – specifically the kind of social democratic or socialist government that shifts resources from the wealthiest to the less well off, that offers a trade-off between curtailments of personal freedom for the rich and greater equality. This might seem implausible, given how central the idea of a gang of super-rich families is to conspiracy theory. But only a few families are included; conspiracy theory tends to pass over the wealthy as a class. It’s striking that the two billionaires most often accused of being the chief New World Order Satanists – George Soros and Bill Gates – are the ones who have, if at times ham-fistedly, given away the largest chunks of their fortunes to worthy causes, one in support of the principle of democracy, the other in support of better health for the poorest. Gates is targeted because of the vast sums he gives to the World Health Organisation and for vaccine research, rather than for what one might assume enslavement-fearing conspiracy theorists would attack him for, the fact that the firm he used to run provides the software for most of their computers. It’s as if, to the conspiracists, Bill Gates of Microsoft is a perfectly respectable American tycoon and his philanthropic self a wicked alter ego. The grandest and most lasting conspiracy theories have swirled around great levelling projects: the French Revolution was a Masonic conspiracy, the Russian Revolution was a Jewish conspiracy, the WHO is a Chinese conspiracy, the British Labour Party and trade unions are a communist conspiracy, the EU is an anti-British conspiracy.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory about the origin of conspiracy theories. It’s an observation that the interests of conspiracy theorists and the interests of the selfish end of the plutocracy have a way of aligning. Both are cynical and mistrustful of institutions of authority, the courts, the media, the government, legislatures: the conspiracists because they think such bodies are malign agents of a secret elite, the plutocrats because they place limits on their wealth and power.

Trump was not the first conspiracy theorist to come to power. Orbán has been the leader of Hungary since 2010; Erdoğan became prime minister of Turkey in 2003. Trump’s election was unusual not just because the American establishment saw itself as immune to capture by a conspiracy theorist, but because he embodies in one person the two poles of hostility to liberal democratic institutions: the plutocrat who hates taxes, regulations and impertinent journalists, and the conspiracy theorist with paranoid delusions about a deep state plot against the people. Perhaps it was inevitable that he would become a character in a phenomenon like QAnon.

Some have described QAnon as more like a religion than a conspiracy theory, and it does stand out from the others in that it imagines two duelling conspiracies – an evil conspiracy, with Hillary Clinton, Hollywood celebs and a pack of evil Democrats running a gigantic operation to kidnap hundreds of thousands of children, keep them prisoner in underground tunnels, torture them, rape them, drink their blood and use them in satanic rituals; and a good conspiracy, led by Trump and a team of loyal heroes in the US military, whose members are preparing to burst out, break up the paedophile Satanist ring and save the children. In QAnon, Trump is portrayed as a cross between Jack Ryan, the tough, smart, patriotic family man played by Harrison Ford in the movies based on the Tom Clancy novels, and the archangel Michael.

There’s​ a danger that in writing about QAnon – a social phenomenon not just in the US but in Britain, Germany and many other countries, and endorsed by a number of Republican candidates – you make it sound more interesting and mysterious than it is. It is interesting, but in the way hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is interesting: novel, painful and incredibly stupid. It began in October 2017 as a series of posts on 4Chan, a bulletin board where lonely young men competed to amuse one another with sniggering memes, racist jokes and outré porn, in which an anonymous person or persons, signing themselves as Q, predicted the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton. Since then, Q has posted almost five thousand times, reassuring followers of his/their identity by using a series of codes that only Q has the password to generate. Q has shifted from 4Chan to another bulletin board, 8chan, which later rebranded as 8kun, each incarnation more sniggering, racist and porny than the last (8chan was also used by the white supremacist terrorists responsible for killings in Christchurch, El Paso and Poway to post their hate manifestos).

Although Q watchers have noted changes of style over time, the basic elements of the conspiracist fantasy have stayed the same. A network of evil child-trafficking Satanists controls most of the country’s institutions, including the CIA and the FBI, but is strongest in the Democratic Party and Hollywood. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – usually referred to as ‘Hussein’ – are among the ringleaders. Concealing his true mission by disguising himself as an ordinary president of the United States, Trump is preparing to take them on. Most of the information given by Q comes in the form of cryptic hints, acronyms, code words and questions which followers are expected to interpret.

Although Q’s impact depends on followers believing that the posts come from a source at the heart of the American defence establishment, it seems unlikely that they would have found an audience without help. Obscure, dull, posted on websites with byzantine interfaces and repulsive content, they would have languished had it not been for two 4Chan moderators, Paul Furber and Coleman Rogers, who persuaded a struggling YouTuber called Tracy Diaz to start making videos interpreting and embroidering the posts. The videos were a hit. As outlined in a 2018 investigation by NBC News, which suggested that Diaz and Rogers themselves may be Q, the QAnon movement spread when people who would never have gone near 4Chan began dissecting and arguing over each post, first on YouTube and Reddit, then on Facebook. Sites sprang up to relay the posts in accessible formats. A hierarchy of ‘researchers’, sometimes called ‘bakers’, developed, from the obsessive to the casual, adding layer on layer of confabulation onto Q’s original inventions. Websites and internet entrepreneurs discovered they could increase traffic and make money by tapping into the interest in QAnon. Faded Instagram influencers and obscure wellness gurus found new audiences by pushing hard on the child abuse angle; when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, then died, and Prince Andrew failed to account for his friendship with him, it was QAnon gold. In effect crowdsourced, the QAnon narrative broke free of Q’s plodding cryptograms, which still look to Trump to mount a military coup against the government he leads, and moved towards its dominant present form: an infinitely branching Satanist-paedophile plot, a preview of a future dystopia in which anyone may be accused on Facebook of the most ghastly crimes with all the due process of a medieval witch trial.

Opposing pandemic-justified social control doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist, but among the anti-lockdown, anti-mask movement outside the US, signs of QAnon are ubiquitous. One of the prominent faces of Covid scepticism in the UK, Louise Hampton, presents herself in videos as an NHS call centre worker who found she was fielding calls from people in medical distress because they were terrified of going to hospital, but not from people with symptoms of Covid-19. This does not explain why her posts are tagged with the QAnon acronym #WWG1WGA, referring to the movement’s Three Musketeers-style slogan: ‘Where We Go One, We Go All.’ The charity Save the Children has been struggling to disassociate itself from another ubiquitous QAnon tag: #SaveTheChildren. At the rally I attended someone put their protest signs in the window of the Trafalgar Square branch of Pret A Manger. ‘Save Our Children – Stop Fucking Our Kids!!’ one sign read. Another: ‘#Revolution #GreatAwakening If dogs get put down for harming kids then so should NONCES!’ What, I wondered, did this have to do with the British government’s response to Covid-19? In the political arena of 2020, the concept of demonising your opponents has become literal.

There have been efforts to portray QAnon followers as directly dangerous: one article in the Financial Times warned that ‘QAnon has the makings of America’s al-Qaida.’ Few Q-adjacent conspiracists have gone as far as Edgar Welch, a North Carolinan who in 2016 marched into a pizza parlour in Washington DC with three loaded guns, intending to rescue the children he believed, under the influence of a QAnon precursor known as Pizzagate, were being kept prisoner there. But Q isn’t urging people to take direct action. He tells his followers – he refers to them as ‘patriots’ – to sit back, not worry, and enjoy the spectacle of Trump’s plan unfolding. ‘Get the popcorn, Friday and Sunday will deliver,’ he said in 2017 when making one abortive prediction. ‘Trust the plan. Step back,’ he told an impatient supporter in 2018. Q has told followers to ‘trust the plan’ 27 times – a plan they have no role in carrying out.

The danger of conspiracy theories is not that they promote action to tear down society but that they delegitimise, distract and divert: they divert large numbers of people from engaging in political action, leaving the field clear for the cynical, the greedy and the violently intolerant. They distract them from questioning authority about society’s real problems by promoting a gory soap opera as if it were real and the result of ‘research’. And they delegitimise the idea that institutions – courts, parliaments, the education system, the salaried media – can be anything other than malign.

To talk to conspiracy theorists like Dominic and Martin is to find yourself pitied as a credulous centrist, relegated to the world of ‘No, but ...’ ‘Do you think kidnapping, raping and murdering children and drinking their blood is OK?’ ‘No, but ...’ ‘Do you like the increasing control faceless corporations, unaccountable billionaires and remote authorities have over our lives?’ ‘No, but ...’ ‘Are you happy about the relentless spread of incomprehensible, intrusive technology?’ ‘No, but ...’ The Covid-19-is-fake movement is strongly opposed to Boris Johnson, who might have hoped for more sympathy as the midwife of the conspiracist project of Brexit. In their recent book about conspiracy, A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum have a way of characterising delegitimation – ‘The people associated with these institutions, it is believed, no longer have standing to persuade or legislate, to reason or coerce, to lay claim to our consent or at least compliance’ – which made me think: ‘That’s exactly the way I feel about Boris Johnson right now.’ But my scepticism doesn’t extend to complete cynicism about the institutions themselves. ‘It doesn’t matter who you vote for, it never did,’ Dominic writes in his leaflet. ‘Governments are criminal cartels for interconnected global elites who’ve an agenda ... complete enslavement of humanity by a small group of psychopaths.’

In a way the saddest aspect of the epidemic of conspiracism is not the delusions about conspiracy but the delusions about what it is to learn. As Muirhead and Rosenblum write, ‘knowledge does not demand certainty; it demands doubt.’ How did it get to the point where a smart young man like Dominic can believe in a binary, red pill-blue pill world of epistemics, in which there are only two hermetically distinct streams of knowledge to choose from, his preferred ‘truth’ and the other, ‘mainstream’, ‘official’ version, which all those who reject his truth believe without question? Where they can warn of the dangers of confirmation bias even as they practise it? These are questions that the community of conspiracy theorists can’t answer by themselves.

 

from: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n20/james-meek/red-pill-blue-pill