Shaurya Thapa made a list of the wildest stories about the pandemic doing the rounds
COVID-19 aka the Coronavirus has had quite a global following by now. Stocks are falling. The sales of hand sanitisers are peaking more than ever. Corona beer is incurring millions in losses. Schools are being shut. Movie release dates are being postponed. Xenophobic remarks and attacks are being made at people with Mongoloid features. Even actor Tom Hanks has tested positive for Corona.
Although the World Health Organisation states that we just need to be cautious and not increasingly fearful as the virus has a low mortality rate, there’s a lot of misinformation circulating around Corona especially on social media. It’s no wonder that World Health Organisation workers have jokingly called this plague an ‘infodemeic’. In the spirit of things, here is a list of all the ridiculous claims being made around the virus.
Gaumutra Can Cure Corona
Gaumutra aka cow urine, and cow dung are the favourite cures to all diseases for many an Indian, especially for one who’s aligned to the extreme Hindu Right. BJP MP Pragya Thakur has confidently asserted that drinking cow urine cures cancer. So, it would come as no surprise when Suman Haripriya, a BJP MLA in Assam said, “I think using cow dung and urine to make the coronavirus cure would prove beneficial.” This statement was apparently backed by Baba Ramdev too which seems believable but this gave birth to some hilarious fake news. A Facebook user posted an old photo of the yoga guru in AIIMS, with a caption claiming that Ramdev has been admitted as he overdosed on gaumutra. And just when you thought that things could not get any weirder, the Hindu Mahasabha is actually having a gaumutra party with the aim of sensitising people to the uses of it against the virus. These are also the same people who thought that the reason these cases surged in India were because the virus was the wrath of a Hindu god angered by people eating meat. Go figure.
Bill Gates invented and Patented Corona
Since 2017, several far-right conspiracy theorists in Reddit have become a part of the QAnon movement, which believes that hidden forces in the American state are trying to bring down the Trump government. This time too, they claim that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is behind the virus.This claim makes Gates an indirect cause as it was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that offered a grant to Pirbright Institute. The grant was to study antibodies for livestock infections. In chickens, a particular virus was being found and the researchers in the institute were perplexed on how this was being replicated.
Then in 2015, it was also speculated that this virus can instead be used in vaccines to cure respiratory diseases in birds. Hence, a patent was made on the virus the same year. To put it simply for a layperson, there is not just one kind of coronavirus; the virus scaring humankind today is of an advanced variety. Jordan Sather, a conspiracy YouTuber from the QAnon school of thought, tweeted about this patent calling corona a planned ‘fad disease’. This sparked off several other tweets which outrightly call out Bill Gates as the ‘creator of corona’. Meanwhile, Gates along with other billionaires like Jack Ma has pledged donations and emergency funds in the affected areas. Now, if this is a genuinely humanitarian effort or an attempt to cover up his ‘creation’, that is open for interpretation.
Aborted Fetus-Eaters Caused It
A common stereotype against Chinese and other Southeast Asians that has come in resurgence since the virus’s outbreak is that they eat all kinds of meat. As the popular theory suggests, the virus spread through someone eating bat soup, this stereotype has been reinterpreted in amusing ways. A Canadian imam in particular, said that the Chinese eat anything that moves, and would readily gulp down even aborted human fetuses. Imam Hussein Ameir added that this is God’s punishment for how Uighur Muslims were detained and persecuted by communist China.
Weed Can kill Coronavirus
Indian director Vivek Agnihotri who is known for making critically-panned right-aligned films tweeted last month that cannabis has the ability to coronavirus sharing a screenshot that referred to the same fact as breaking news. In this tweet too, he managed to make an anti-Congress jab saying that weed got a bad name In India because of Rajiv Gandhi. The source of this screenshot was found later and it turned out that the image was taken from a meme page.
Corona is a Leaked Chinese Bioweapon
Many in US and even in India speculate that corona’s outbreak was not an accident but a manufactured threat by China. It is being thought that China was manufacturing a deadly virus (which got leaked or was leaked on purpose) to affect the global economies of major First World countries. While it seems believable, there is little proof to support this as of now and scientists are already dismissing this claim. Chemical biologists state that the genome sequence of the virus doesn’t indicate that it was created artificially in a lab. But that doesn’t stop people from falling for the hysteria. In fact, the Republican Senator Tom Cotton recently supported this theory on Fox News.
As of now, Delhi’s public establishments like schools and cinema halls have been asked to stay shut till 31st March. Similar protocols are to be implemented in other Indian cities. The future course of corona’s spread in India and rest of the world seems unpredictable but don’t fall prey to misinformation amidst all these conspiracy theories, and ‘meme-able’ news.
