Partly this came out of trying to describe the journey some right-wing figures have taken during the covid pandemic. Once you step into right-wing social media there's often a Gish Gallop of stuff on covid with a broad conspiratorial message (i.e. the idea that covid is somehow a plot by the government against everybody). The problem is you get such a mix of things that reasonable and semi-reasonable positions are mixed in with utter crackpot stuff. For example, there are legitimate questions about lockdown measures and about heavy-handed police tactics that are actually becoming harder to discuss because those issues keep getting hijacked by gibberish.

The overall goal is to undermine the consensus and effectiveness of public health measures by tapping into a. legitimate fears and b. existing nonsensical fears. By legitimate fears, I mean for example the usual kind of policing & surveillance powers governments grab in a crisis but also legitimate questions about jobs or the psychological & social impacts of the current situation.

If you want an example of the kind of omelette of covid-conspiracy being served up, here is Peter Grant https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-covid-19-lies-are-falling-apart.html

If you are careful you can pick out things that are semi-reasonable amid the things that are nonsense, and some of the nonsense has plausible elements.

I'm playing with a list of common elements in these kinds of positions to help clarify how far down the conspiracy trail particular figures have gone. Some of these elements are, by themselves, reasonable positions or, at some point in time, were reasonable positions to have questions about. Others are just nonsense or built from more general anti-vaccine or anti-government tropes reapplied to the current crisis.

This is a rough initial list and not presented in a particular order. I would expect a reasonable, non-conspiracy theory minded person to at least have some sympathy or accept the reasonableness of some of these points i.e. many of these in isolation don't make you a covid-denier by any means and several of them have their own spectrum that runs from reasonable doubts to full-on conspiracy-mongering.

  • Blames China: this is more of general tone of attributing Covid-19 as the fault of China in a vague sense. More spin and framing than conspiracy theory if presented in isolation.
  • Claims China created the pandemic: this is an overt conspiracy theory, more common in the early days of 2020, that the virus is a deliberate policy of the Chinese government. This grew less popular on the right because it sits poorly with the other conspiracy idea that covid-19 is a minor ailment.
  • Lab leak hypothesis: a hypothesis isn't a conspiracy theory and currently it's not impossible that covid-19 arose in a medical laboratory researching corona viruses. Not impossible...but also the evidence remains thin and circumstantial. The path into conspiratorial thinking is the step were a hypothesis is asserted as fact despite the paucity of evidence AND the idea that the 'truth' is being hidden by governments internationally.
  • Covid statistics/reporting is false: obviously medical statistics are imperfect and as we've seen in other fields, any legitimate uncertainty in figures can be used to cast doubt on everything. We legitimately don't know the 'true' rate of infections because cases of covid can be asymptomatic but that's not the same as people having no idea at all.
  • Low mortality claims: a more specific claim about covid stats is that the number of deaths is exaggerated. More common last year but still present and usually based on the idea that older people dying of covid may have been close to death anyway. Obviously, there are going to be edge cases with cause-of-death reporting but that's always true. This is also an example where the initial situation when health officials had little information to go on is used to discredit official information in general (i.e. the figures changed over time as people got better data).
  • Low infection rates claims: similar to the above but with the degree to which data on infection rates is imperfect and subject to change.
  • Strawman claims social distancing doesn't work: arguably it doesn't "work" because by itself it doesn't stop covid but the claim here is were people ignore that social distancing is part of multiple strategies to slow the spread. The arguments presented by the more conspiratorial minded treat social distancing as a strawman where it was supposed to (somehow) stop covid completely...and as it hasn't therefore everything was a big lie etc.
  • Strawman claims masks don't work: this one has had a long evolution and was exacerbated by initial confused messaging about masks. You can find people on the right who were initially pro-mask when the official advice was at best mixed about masks (first quarter of 2020) who shifted to being anti-max when the advice changed in favour of masks. Rules mandating masks have been an obvious point of friction and understandably so. However, the efficacy of masks follows arguments similar to ones about social distancing i.e. if they are imperfect then they must (somehow) be useless with no territory inbetween 100% effective and 0%. Also, it really isn't impossible that when all is said & done and long term studies of mask policies evaluate their effecitvness, that perhaps those policies didn't do much (or maybe the opposite and they saved many lives). Imperfect knowledge is part of the nature of dealing with a new disease.
  • Claims that messaging on anti-covid measure were lies because they changed: these are agument intended to discredit whatever the current advice is and tie into questions about social distancing, masks and lockdowns or other restrictions. There's an undeniable fact there that public health messaging changed over time but the reasons are obvious. Firstly imperfect knowledge and secondly public policy is always going to be a trade off based on multiple political factors.
  • Claims lockdowns don't work: another big spectrum of claims that range from reasonable criticism to absurdities. International and regional approaches to lockdowns have been varied and the implimentation of them has raised many legitimate questions. Mixed in with that spectrum of discussion are variations on some of the same style of strawman arguments discussed above.
  • Lockdowns are damaging: this is undeniable. Clealry being stuck in a house is psychologically unpleasant at best and very difficult for many people. There are clear economic impacts as well. However, the impact of lockdowns is not easy to quantify and in the more conspiratorial social media space you quickly find poorly sourced claims that impact is much higher than has been documented.
  • Lockdowns are some sort of plot: this is more overt conspiracy mongering i.e. the idea that government are trying to trap people in their homes for nefarious reasons. It's hard to deny the authoritarian streak in many governments but that streak has always been accompanied by those same governments wanting people going to work and if not working, going to the shops.
  • Survelliance issues: government covid tracking apps or sign-in apps have created an issue where the balance of a public health crisis meets the genuine fear of how the government or police might abuse the information they collect. Many abosultely 100% legitimate concerns but also an entry point into broader conspiracies.
  • Food shortage predictions: these were more common mid-2020 with the idea that lockdown measures were going to stop farmers growing food or a general economic collapse because of covid.
  • Anti-Fauci: specifically in the US. This is one of the simplest and most direct indications of somebody going a long way down the covid-denial rabbit hole. Memes or rhetoric attacking Dr Anthony Fauci because of his high profile role as chief medical advisor to the US President. In other countries, this might be directed at similar figures who have had equivalent roles.
  • Experts were wrong: this is similar to the issue about changing messaging on public health advice but with a specific focus on claiming that key experts (such as Dr Fauci) were wrong at some point in the pandemic but in particular focusing on what was said in the first several months of 2020. The point here is to discredit medical expertise in general (as opposed to just government public health advice in general but obviously the two are connected).
  • Experts lied: the more extreme version of the point above but with the added twist that what was said was lies or intended to decieve the public for nefarious reasons.
  • Pro-Hydroxychloroquine: the drug did really once look like it might have some effect against covid-19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine but systematic trials showed that whatever benefits it might have were slim (at best) compared to the risks. So there's a bit of a time spectrum here, somebody saying in March 2020 "hydroxychloroquine might be a cure" is speculating whereas somebody saying that it is a cure in March 2021 is ignoring medical evidence. Again, medical understanding changes and who knows, somebody might discover a way it treats covid in some people or in some circumstances at some point in the future...or they very well might not. Claiming it is a cure now is making claims that run counter to known facts.
  • Pro-Ivermectin: there genuinely were studies showing some effectiveness of this anti-parasite drug against covid but those were in-vitro studies with high concentration. Clinical trials led to a mess of information when a number of low-quality (and possibly fraudulent) trials showed amazing success, along with other trials that showed little or no positive results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin So again, there's a time factor here. A reasonable person could have looked at the available evidence late in 2020 and concluded that ivermectin had promise. Not changing your mind about that in the face of evidence is a different matter. There's another dimension here which is the socioeconomics of the pandemic. With access to vaccines being far more limited in many developing nations, the use of ivermectin has continued because of its relative availability as an anti-parisitic drug for humans and animals. If, on the other hand, you are an affluent person in a affluent city taking horse paste instead of a vaccine then, yes, you deserve at least some mockery.
  • Other fake cures: by this is mean the more obvious non-science based quackery. If somebody is selling homeopathic cures for covid for example.
  • General anti-vaccine nonsense: there is a two-way street here. There are reasonable and semi-reasonable issues listed above that help bring some people along into more weird positions. Similarly, people who were already anti-vaccine follow a path to adopting other positions (or joining an anti-lockdown protest). In principle somebody could be anti-vaccine but pro-lockdowns or pro-vaccine specifically as an alternative to lockdowns but the further down the conspiracy path you go, the more the whole set of beliefs gets adopted.
  • Covid vaccine dangers: vaccines don't have zero risks but they have low risks compared to other common medication. Hyping up actual side effects or claiming false causality when a vaccinated person suffers some unrelated ailment, are standard anti-vaccine tactics. Again, there's a spectrum here of reasonable concern through to conspiratorial nonsense.
  • Claims covid vaccines don't work: this varies from 'just asking questions' stances as to why the vaccines haven't been miracle cures already to overt claims that the vaccines don't work. This is often accompanied by misinformation or misleading stats (e.g. pointing to the proportion of covid cases in the vaccinated v unvaccinated in countries with 70%+ of the population with at least one vaccine dose).
  • Claims covid vaccines aren't vaccines: this maybe specifically pointed at vaccines such the mRNA style vaccine such as the Pfizer vaccine on the ground that they don't work in the traditional way. This is often a lead into nuttier anti-vaccine conspiracies.
  • Nuttier anti-vaccine conspiracies: too many to list but these are the more obviously out-there claims about tracking chips and 5G networks etc.
  • Anti-booster shot: many vaccines need multiple shots. Chicken pox, for example, is the gift that keeps on giving and past infection doesn't give you lifelong immunity but instead the chance of getting shingles in later life. Influenza adapts to human immunity with such agility that yearly vaccinations are needed. However, the fact that covid vaccines might need additional shots is being used as a rhetorical point to bolster other claims from the nuttier ones to stoking fears of side-effects.
  • Anti-vaccine mandate: can and should governments make you take a vaccine? What about employers? There are legitimate ethical questions there but add in any of the more conspiratorial aspects listed above and the idea that people will be pressured or legal obligied to take covid vaccines takes on a more sinister aspect.

I'm not sure if I should group these or rank them (e.g. from reasonable to utter nonsense) or group them thematically and then rank them. I want to stress again that I'm including reasonable points (or points that start reasonably or which were reasonable at some point prior to further data) not to demonise people who have sensible concerns but to try and get a sense of the spectrum of the issues and to see the entry points to more radical beliefs.

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