Separating fact from ‘fake news’ on COVID-19
There’s nothing a virus likes more than a good conspiracy theory
As time goes by, as confinement feels tighter and tighter, bloated with Pogos, white wine and Miss Vickie’s chips, ill-informed by people who can’t tell a virus from a bacteria, I wonder if our common smarts and individual brains will survive COVID-19. Never mind our lungs.
François Legault, Horacio Arruda and Danielle Mccann are doing their best to bring Quebecers usable, and verified, information. I for one, support their decision not to share all of the experts’ speculative data. Although this may change today because of pressure felt from Ontario and B.C.
Speculation becomes information only when it is confirmed. Or not, depending on expectations. I despise speculative journalism, even in these dark days of a pandemic. In fact, even more so because it creates panic and thickens the sadness so many feel, especially when elderly family members are confined to a residence, without visitors.
So, as the saying, erroneously attributed to Joe Friday in Dragnet, goes: “Just the facts, ma’am.” It came from a parody of the famous 1950s detective show. And it still rings true to me.
Which brings me to another aspect of “the facts,” namely conspiracy theories. There’s nothing a virus likes more than a good conspiracy theory Petri dish that gives it instant media exposure and popular legitimacy.
Says Edwin Hodge, a sociologist from the University of Victoria: “One of the things I found that a lot of conspiracy theories do is provide a sense of order to a chaotic universe.”
UN Secretary- General Antonio Guterres said that the world is not only fighting the “common enemy” of the virus but “our enemy is also the growing surge of misinformation” about the disease. The UN launched a COVID-19 Communications for Solidarity Initiative to bring science and facts to the world.
This is, of course, the same United Nations that just named China to a human rights council panel where it will help select the council’s investigators on issues such as freedom of speech, health, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.
Not bad for a country that jailed at least a million Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps.
But I digress. Back to the real “fake news” — a.k.a. “conspiracy theories.”
You’ve probably heard a few: the virus was created in la lab, something 25 per cent of people in France believe, and 30 per cent in the United States. Reasons vary: to bring down President Donald Trump, started by Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh. Some think the virus was created so that multinational biopharmas could make big money from a dangerous vaccine. Many purveyors of conspiracy theories also peddle anti-vaxxer junk theories.
On Sunday, La Presse presented some of the province’s most hardcore nationalist extremists on the web, who also traffic in wild theories about the virus, chloroquine, Trump and Hillary Clinton and pedophilia.
Does the name Jacques Cossette-trudel ring a bell? It should: Cossette-trudel led the FLQ cell that kidnapped British diplomat James Cross in 1970. But this is not the one at cause here but his son, Alexis, who spews conspiracy nonsense to large audiences on Youtube, such as Sophie Trudeau is an agent for George Soros, and Dr. Anthony Fauci is a mole for Hillary Clinton.
The pandemic, he says, has long been orchestrated by the medical elites to dump Trump.
But their plan failed when Trump revealed the existence of chloroquine, which is why the establishment is trying to stop the medication from being prescribed. Crazier is his theory that the navy hospital ship in New York will carry prisoners to Guantanamo as Trump “drains the swamp.”
Cossette-trudel is a highly educated man — with a master’s degree in political science and a doctorate in religious science and PHD in semiology on the way — gone rogue on common sense. At least he’s not advocating violence or Nazism like his grandfather Gérard Lanctôt, who was the sidekick of Adrien Arcand, the self-styled “führer canadien.”