The tragic death of Erin Hitchens, a Florida pastor, has not, at least on my social network timelines, become a mix of ‘I-told-you-so’ and gloating at the idiocy of believing from the least qualified people in the world that COVID-19 is a hoax, a government conspiracy, caused by 5G and a million other conspiracy theories. Hitchens died of COVID-19 despite her husband Brian Lee Hitchens believing it was a hoax. That it wasn’t and isn’t a hoax is now something Mr Hitchens well understands. Having lost his beloved wife, he wishes he had behaved differently.
The sad reality is that there are an awful lot of people who do believe the baseless conspiracy stories. Because it’s on the internet and even on the hated mainstream media, it must be true. Fake news has always been with us and this time with fatal consequences. We are lied to on a daily basis by politicians and certain people and organisations. Our prime minister is the biggest liar of them all, apart from his partner in political crime Donald J Trump, who has brought lying to new levels. Indeed, it was Trump who announced to a startled world that bleach could be a cure for COVID-19. Such were the concerns of bleach companies, they were forced to put out statements that bleach, rather than cure you might kill you.
9/11 untruthers, anti-vaxxers, 5G theorists – every single instance without a single grain of evidence. People even believe that Bill Gates, who is a great believer in vaccinations, has declined to have his own children vaccinated. And why do they believe it? Because some unhinged crank or, more likely, an agent of the political far right wants to plant seeds of doubt in people’s minds.
In Britain, it is believed that some 30% of the population would refuse to take a COVID-19 vaccine should one ever become available, ignoring all the science and all the facts and putting everyone else at risk and prolonging the life of the virus.
We know that much of the mainstream media provides us with fake news. Anyone who has ever read the Sun, Mail and Express will vouch for that, as will anyone who watches Fox News with an open mind. And then there are the websites like Breitbart, Infowars and The Canary which simply lie to us. I understand that negotiating a media that is vast up to how it used to be is not easy. You really have to think before you listen. But in the end, do you believe Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, or former snooker presenter David Icke? Stephen Hawking or Donald Trump? It really is as simple as that.
This is not to say that science is right about everything. Science always changes when theories are tested and different evidence becomes available. I do not pretend for one second to understand all the science so I have to make the choice of deciding who to believe.
In any case, believing the conspiracists requires a leap of faith on an industrial scale. If COVID-19 is a hoax, invented presumably by the deep state run by various lizards and paedophiles, then that conspiracy must involve almost every scientist, every journalist, every politician, every civil servant; in short almost everyone on the planet. Christ – President Bill Clinton couldn’t even hide the fact that he’d received a blow job from an intern in his office. If you can’t hide that, how on earth could you carry out a hoax on the entire planet? Spoiler alert: you couldn’t. It’s not possible.
Erin Hitchens died partly through ignorance but mainly at the hands of the sick and twisted minds of the conspiracists, who peddle lies and misinformation and so got them to doubt the science and the evidence. Often the truth can be dull to the extent that you wonder how it can be true whereas sometimes the truth can be incredibly complex to understand. But in each case, claims are tested repeatedly, often to the point of destruction.
The truth is out there and so are lies. The tricky bit sometimes is working out which is which. That’s why we rely on experts who put the evidence before us. It’s why we visit the GP and not a shaman.
