One of the biggest challenges facing people who promote conspiracy theories is that experts, who know what they’re talking about, disagree with them.
It’s hard to convince someone that NASA faked the moon landing when astronomers, astronauts and rocket scientists can easily show that they didn’t. Likewise, the idea that covid vaccine is part of a depopulation agenda doesn’t really fly when vaccinologists can present statistics which show that unvaccinated people have died at higher rates than the vaccinated.
So they have to find ways to persuade people to ignore experts.
“Feelings don’t care about your facts”
In 2021, “The Real News” was dropped through letterboxes of sixty thousand New Zealand households. Alongside headings like “Medical doctors declare that the pandemic was planned” and “Who is behind the plan to control the world?”, an advert from antivax conspiracy group Voices for Freedom asked “Are your spidey senses tingling?”
It was a direct appeal to the readers’ intuition. Why bother listening to public health experts who are saying that covid is a threat and recommending social distancing if you just “know” something doesn’t quite add up? We all think we’ve got a pretty good bullshit detector and we’ve all had sudden insights that solved a problem. So why not just ignore the experts and trust your gut feelings instead?
Pitched well this can be a persuasive argument. You can even add a bit of flattery and dress it up as empowerment “Only you know what feels right and you should never give that power over to someone else”. Do you love your freedom or are you one of the compliant “sheeple” who does what they are told?
“You Can’t Trust Experts”
Conspiracy theorists also try to undermine trust in experts by arguing that the scientific or medical consensus is being manipulated and they are complicit in hiding the “truth”. Precisely why or how depends on their specific theory, but it’s always a version of “a powerful elite is pulling their strings”. Conveniently, this allows them to write off whole fields of inquiry such as climate science or vaccine research as irredeemably corrupt and therefore not credible. It also means they can pose as independent, honest “Truthseekers” who’ve done their research and have found some pretty alarming evidence about what’s really going on.
These arguments can seem convincing because they often contain a grain of truth. For example, the Pharma industry spends huge amounts lobbying politicians and billions on marketing which could be spent on biomedical research. So it’s not unreasonable to question its influence or motives. There have also been high profile examples of malpractice and regulatory failure, such as the US opioid crisis.
But just because the story conspiracy theorists tell about the COVID-19 vaccines is potentially plausible doesn’t mean it’s true, especially when there is substantial evidence to the contrary. The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines has now been assessed by a small mountain of studies and ongoing clinical surveillance carried out by scientists and regulatory agencies around the world. Virtually all of them point in the same direction. So you don’t have to put your faith in Big Pharma or think that politicians are nice people who care about your welfare to know that they prevented serious disease or that side effects are rare.
If you can’t beat’em, insult and intimidate ’em
A particularly unpleasant tactic used to discredit experts involves mocking their personal characteristics. Someone’s gender or appearance shouldn’t matter, but if you say “Expert X is overweight, so why would anyone listen to his health advice?” some people will nod along in agreement. Apart from being mean, the point is to exploit people’s unconscious stereotypes of what an expert “should” look like to undermine their credibility. So that, for example, someone being a woman with pink hair is considered more important than their scientific expertise.
More commonly NZ conspiracy groups cast doubt on experts’ motivations. The accusations don’t need to be true. What’s important is that they leave the impression that their opinions are for sale, or that they are driven by ambition or cowardice.
Public health experts and medical professionals are frequently referred to as criminals or traitors, and they are routinely accused of covering up mass vaccine deaths and injuries. For example the New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science website (managed by a former Voices For Freedom local group coordinator) describes the “covid injection” as an “attempt a genocide-in-the-making whose breadth has already begun to rival the familiar genocides of the previous century” and bemoan the “perceived treason of most in the medical profession working in lockstep with government”.
Outdoors and Freedoms Party co-leader Sue Grey described the vaccination rollout to 12–17-year-olds as “government-mandated genocide” and compared the vaccine to rape and murder. VFF co-founder Claire Deeks was listed as attorney at law for a bogus “grand jury proceeding by the Peoples’ Court of Public Opinion” And NZDSOS recently sent a “Notice of Liability to criminal prosecution” to all key decision-makers in the previous and current governments.
The impact of this kind of rhetoric was predictable. During the pandemic people swarmed online to abuse kiwi science communicators and several faced serious harassment and death threats. An infamous “Nuremberg” website where people were encouraged to add to the “accused list” promised “judgment day is here.” On Telegram, people drew up lists of doctors and public health experts who they wanted put on trial and sentenced to hang for “crimes against humanity”, and sovereign citizens groups swore in deputies to carry out the arrests.
The hostility generated by these conspiracy groups has had a chilling effect because it deters experts from speaking out for fear of reprisals. As a result these groups have been able to pump out more anti vaccine disinformation with very little pushback. For their supporters, the myth of mass vaccine-induced deaths is now an article of faith.
Fake “experts” and fringe scientists
Conspiracy groups also cultivate their own experts to make their arguments appear more credible.
Some call themselves researchers, independent journalists or even “media personalities”, but a more accurate description is “influencer”. They’ve “done their research” and feel comfortable giving us the word on issues they don’t fully understand. What they lack in relevant education or experience they make up for in confidence, relatability, ideological commitment and a desire for clicks and followers – think Russell Brand, Chantelle Baker or Voices for Freedom’s “chief researcher“ Alia Bland.
Influencers know that this isn’t enough, so they put a lot of effort into finding people who agree with them and can make their talking points seem more legitimate. It’s a symbiotic relationship where the influencers gain credibility and content when “experts” appear on their platforms, and in return “experts” get exposure to a wider audience. But because their ideas run counter to mainstream expert opinion, influencers have to lean heavily on pseudo-experts who sound like they have relevant knowledge and expertise but in reality, don’t.
Local examples include people like Lynda Wharton and Guy Hatchard. Wharton has diplomas in acupuncture and naturopathy. She has been described as an “international advocate of food safety and natural medicine” and has written (non-academic) books on health related topics. Hatchard’s highest qualification is a Ph.D. in Psychology. He has published a few academic papers focused on meditation and authored a book about “a new paradigm of…self-healthcare based on the properties of DNA, evolutionary biology, Maharishi Ayurveda, and the power of consciousness to transform our world”.
Neither of them are doctors or scientists. Their qualifications and experience are in the “health and wellness” space and “alternative treatments” advocacy. But they are Pākehā, well-spoken and seem middle class, so to a lot of people they look like experts. They also know enough to sound sciencey and they quote papers from PubMed to give people the impression their opinions are well founded. This means networks like Counterspin and Voices for Freedom can promote them as experts on vaccines and Covid-19. So they now have large audiences who trust them more than genuine subject experts and medical professionals, who they routinely accuse of being corrupt, malicious and dishonest.
They laughed at Galileo… but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown
Finally there are the contrarians: a small but vocal minority who have an outsized influence because they are able to exploit the credibility conferred by relevant professional background and genuine qualifications. Voices for Freedom were quick to recognise these fringe experts could enhance their brand and give people the impression that their conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine disinformation was based on science. So they cultivated a relationship with the ‘Covid Plan B’ academics and invited its epidemiologist, Simon Thornley, to speak at their launch event.
Throughout the pandemic VFF have played off a common misperception that an expert’s “authority” comes from their qualifications or professional title. So they platformed a number of qualified doctors (invariably described as “top” “leading” or “renowned”) who agreed with them about Covid-19 or vaccines, and then presented this agreement as evidence that their perspective was ‘backed by medical science’. But in reality, the authority of any expert doesn’t come from their credentials, education, and prestige but from systematically identifying and reflecting the totality of evidence, scrutinized by the global scientific community and refined as new data emerges. But that’s not what the experts they platformed were doing.
For example a regular guest was NZDSOS spokesperson Dr Matt Shelton, who wrote a paper suggesting covid-19 vaccines make people magnetic and claimed to have seen evidence they contain secret, self assembling nanotech. Another NZDSOS member VFF interviewed was Dr Samantha Bailey, a virus denier who questions whether the covid-19 virus exists and thinks rabies is caused by a toxin. VFF also held joint events with NZDSOS to promote ivermectin, which both groups still say cures COVID19, long after large, high quality randomised trials have demonstrated that it doesn’t work.
The interaction of fringe experts and conspiracy theory groups is now a global problem. Four members of the “disinformation dozen” (responsible for 65% of covid-19 and vaccine misinformation shared on the big social media platforms) have a medical background. This includes Sherri Tennypenny who testified to a US state senate hearing that there’s a “yet to be defined interface, between what’s being injected into these shots and all of the 5G towers”.
Are your spidey senses tingling, because you don’t need to be an expert to recognise that something doesn’t quite add up? We’re Just asking Questions, but maybe what’s really going on is that these people are just parroting antivax talking points they’ve read on the internet. Perhaps they are using their professional status to give people the impression it’s credible. Could their performative outrage and cries of “censorship” just be a ruse to dodge accountability? What if their claims about the system of expert peer-review being “corrupt” are merely a convenient excuse to ignore evidence that contradicts them? What if these people aren’t credible because they don’t actually have solid evidence to back up their claims? Look into your heart and the answers are there.
