In my experience, most conspiracy theories fall apart in the same place in the same way. Let me outline the steps for debunking them.
First, ask the conspiracy theorist the goals of the conspiracy. What are those running the conspiracy trying to accomplish? In the case of the "SARS-COV-2 is a Chinese bioweapon" conspiracy theory, the goal is to infect America with a pandemic in order to disrupt our economy.
Then go through the list of decisions made by those running the conspiracy, and ask yourself if a person with the above-stated goals would make those particular decisions. In this case, the Chinese government developed a Super Disease in a Secret Lab and chose to unleash their superweapon on the Chinese city of Wuhan, which is an important part of the Chinese economy.
Instead of, you know, using your special superweapon developed in a secret lab on, well, the target, which is presumably not Wuhan.
The more you understand about bioweapons, the dumber this decision gets.
The Anticipated Response
For example, South Korea and the USA got their first infections on the same day. South Korea and the USA had very different responses to the pandemic. Consequently, America is now experiencing more of this disease than nearly any other nation, while South Korea is experiencing less than nearly any other nation.
Here's the thing: at the time our secret cabal made its decision to attack America by releasing a disease on one of their own cities, they had no idea how their intended target would have responded. If America responded to the pandemic the same way South Korea did (which is the same response the experts suggested to Trump), then America would have experienced very little disease and very little death, and far less damage to the economy. The Chinese running this supposed conspiracy could not possibly have anticipated how good or bad the American response to the pandemic would be. If America responded like South Korea, then the Chinese secret plot would have devastated a Chinese city and a significant portion of their own economy in order to cause minimal damage to America.
Bioweapons in General Are Stupid
This is exactly why most nations choose not to use bioweapons. Once released, the weapon cannot be controlled. Even if those supposed Chinese conspirators were smart enough to release the disease in the target country instead of their own, there is no guarantee that the disease would not end up harming China and nations allied with China around the world.
Indeed, the first recorded use of a bioweapon was by the Mongols in 1347, and they managed to kill themselves in addition to their enemies, and their action led to the Black Death pandemic that swept Europe. Even if the Mongols weren't killed by their own bioweapon, their actions made all the other cities much less profitable to plunder.
Does 5G Cause COVID-19?
Let's look at another stupid conspiracy theory. First, we'll have to get in the weeds about the actual claims being made by this particular conspiracy. The claim is that 5G operates at "resonant frequencies" that break certain molecular bonds, which weakens the immune system, and makes people more susceptible to the SARS-COV-2 virus.
Aside: First, any actual science expert would not use the term "resonant frequencies," but talk about "ionizing radiation," which occurs at frequencies above the visible spectrum. While millimeter wave 5G is operating at much higher frequencies than 4G (so high that it's in the microwave band rather than the radio band), but it's still far below the frequency needed to disrupt chemical bonds.
Let us consider the decisions of the conspirators.
They spent who knows how many billions of dollars completely replacing the cell network infrastructure in a way that required building a large number of entirely new cell towers, all so that they could weaken people's immune systems in order to make it somewhat more likely that they might catch a disease that is going around.
This conspiracy involves spending a very large amount of money, requires the coordinated efforts of a large number of people with incredible technical skill, and all for a slight increase in infection rates during a pandemic.
The Mechanics of COVID-19
Let us now consider what decisions we would actually make if our goal was to give more people the COVID-19 disease.
For a good example, let's look at why things got so bad in Italy. Diseases spread exponentially. This is why it's so important to control the spread of a new disease as early as possible. If you do not, the disease gets out of control very quickly.
With COVID-19, around 80% of those who get the disease do not require any hospitalization at all. Of those who need hospitalization, some percentage of those are going to need to go to Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Some percentage of those who need intensive care will die.
If the disease spreads to so many people that the number of patients needing ICU treatment exceeds the number of ICUs in a given area, then every new person who needs intensive care simply dies (or, someone else is pulled from ICU and they die instead). So if you fail to control the exponential growth of a new disease and things get bad enough that the ICUs in your area are swamped, the death rate gets much higher very quickly. This is what happened in Italy.
So why did things get so out of control so quickly in Italy? How did their ICUs get swamped at a time when other nations were still arguing over how much of a lockdown to implement? It was all because of one soccer game.
Back To the Conspiracy
If your goal is to spread a novel disease, what you want to do is find one person who definitely has the disease, or some group of people that are likely to have the disease, and encourage them to attend as many large public gatherings as possible.
So let's review.
The most effective way to spread a disease further during a pandemic is to simply use a few words on the right people, while discouraging governments from ending large public gatherings. Anyone with any understanding of epidemiology could have told the conspirators this.
But we are to believe that instead of just spreading a bad message to as many people as possible (an action that would be very cheap and guaranteed to get big results), the conspirators instead chose to spend billions of dollars replacing the cell network infrastructure, all so that they could cause modest increases in infection rates.
What conspirator would ever choose the cell towers over simple propaganda?
Most Conspiracy Theories Fail the Same Way
If the 9/11 conspirators' goal was to cause the invasion of Iraq, why did they have a large group of Saudi Arabians train in Afghanistan to launch their immensely complicated attack? A smaller group posing as Iraqis with surface-to-air missiles at various airports would have been far easier to pull off, and would be guaranteed to result in Iraq receiving the blame.
And why use chemtrails to distribute poison? By the time that poison reaches the ground, it will have been diluted by millions of tons of atmosphere. You would have to distribute a massive amount of poison to have even modest results on the public's health when it would be far simpler, cheaper, and involve fewer conspirators to just put the poison in the water supply system.
I cannot, however, say the same thing about the Waco conspiracy theories, because I cannot get believers to tell me what the motive of the conspiracy actually was. They can tell me that the conspiracy was very sinister and very complicated, but they cannot articulate what the conspiracy was supposed to accomplish. Anyway, most conspiracy theories do fall apart in the same way under this type of scrutiny. Begin with the claimed goal of the conspiracy, then ask yourself what decisions you would make if you were running that conspiracy. The result is almost never the actions claimed by conspiracy theorists.
Comments