Ian Fantom – May 6, 2020

The Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, has been putting it about that research into COVID-19 ‘conspiracy theories’ suggests that they bear a danger to public health. They admit that their research is tentative and has not been peer reviewed, but this is not evident from the attention-grabbing headlines. The reported research is merely into correlations between belief in ‘conspiracy theories’ and individual compliance with mandated social-distancing measures.

The essence of their research boils down to showing that people who do not believe the need for social distancing or self-isolation are less likely to follow mandated social-distancing measures than those who do. This is intuitive and obvious, but their conclusions are obscured by woolly concepts such as ‘conspiracy theories’, which is neither defined, nor used consistently. The claimed health dangers are not derived from the work they report in their own paper, but are an extrapolation from previous papers and articles by psychologists who write about other ‘conspiracy theories’. They acknowledge in their paper “a degree of conjecture” in their thinking on that, but further analysis draws me to the conclusion that the claimed health dangers are unfounded and speculative.

They fail to take into account the fact that the need for such mandated social-distancing measures has been fiercely contested by various medical specialists in the fields of virology and epidemiology. Their speculation seems to assume that all ‘conspiracy theories’ are wrong, and that assertions put out by the government and the mainstream media are correct. Nor do they take into account any negative health effects arising from social isolation and the reduction in hospital services relating to other medical conditions, which have arisen from the alarm brought about not through ‘conspiracy theories’ but through the government’s statements and widespread reports throughout the mainstream media.

The paper referred to is: ‘Analytic Thinking, Rejection of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Conspiracy Theories, and Compliance with Mandated Social-Distancing: Direct and Indirect Relationships in a Nationally Representative Sample of Adults in the United Kingdom’. The authors are Viren Swami of the School of Psychology and Sport Science, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and David Barron of the Centre for Psychological Medicine, Perdana University, Serdang, Malaysia. The paper acknowledges the funding as research grant PU-CPM-001 from Perdana University. I didn’t find the specific grant, but I did find that Viren Swami and David Barron are respectively Director and Deputy Director of the Centre for Psychological Medicine at Perdana University. I didn’t discover the original source of the funding.

Press Reports

Medical Xpress on 24 April published an article by Anglia Ruskin University headed ‘Rejecting conspiracy theories aids public health’. The article began by reporting, “New research has found that UK adults who reject COVID-19 conspiracy theories are more likely to comply with social distancing measures”, but two paragraphs later the article states: “The findings of the new study, led by Professor Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), indicate there are health benefits to be gained from helping the public to reject COVID-19 conspiracy theories”. This is a big leap from the findings of the research, and is dependent on a belief in the government’s contested mandated measures.

They quote Professor Viren Swami, as saying: “Ensuring the largest possible number of people are complying with social distancing is essential to minimize the threat to life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic”. Coming from a university professor working in the health field – and Psychology in the UK is integrated into the National Health Service – and appearing in a medical journal, will have some weight as a professional opinion. For anyone who is aware that both authors are professors in a research team on Psychological Medicine, such a statement must be taken as a expert medical view. However, this view is contested by various leading specialists in the fields of virology and epidemiology. If Professor Swami considers himself to be a medical authority on that, the implication may be that he considers COVID-19 to be a psychological illness.

The quote continues:

Our results suggest that individuals who think more analytically—characterized by deliberative, demanding, and slow thinking styles—tend to be more compliant with social distancing rules. In addition, individuals who think more analytically are also more likely to reject conspiracy theories about the pandemic, which in turn is associated with greater compliance.

Finding ways to nudge citizens towards thinking analytically and questioning, and ultimately rejecting, conspiracy theories—and those who promote them—may be vital at this time.

Nudging citizens towards “thinking analytically”, as mentioned in the final paragraph, is exactly what I am attempting to do in the present analysis. However, whether people reject ‘conspiracy theories’ must be left to their own analytical thinking, and not be the objective. Furthermore, I would regard it as unprofessional to reject the people (“and those who promote them”) as distinct to their information or arguments. I would consider that to be encouraging ‘ad hominem’ attacks, which should have no place in science. I find much to be desired in the analytic thinking in that quote, and indeed in Swami and Barron’s paper.

The same article also appeared on the same day in the website of Cambridge Network, a membership organisation based in the “vibrant high technology cluster of Cambridge, UK”. Here they added at the bottom: “The conclusions of the study are tentative until after peer-review and the preliminary study is available via the Open Science Framework here.”.

A report had appeared the previous day on the ITV website, headed a little more correctly ‘Anglia Ruskin University finds that conspiracy believers are less likely to follow public health guidance’, but the first sentence states, “New research from Anglia Ruskin University has found that believing in conspiracy theories is a danger to public health”. On the same day the Mail Online published a report, which contained the text as an insert to a story on Twitter banning 5G ‘conspiracy theory’ tweets “designed to cause panic or encourage vandalism after nonsense claims that it causes coronavirus spread online”. The insert was headed ‘Fake news is helping to spread COVID-19, study suggests’.

Harpers Magazine published an article headed ‘Exploring the psychology of conspiracy theories – and why they heighten anxiety’ consisting of interviews with Professor Swamy and one of his previous co-authors, Professor Karen Douglas, who also specialises in the psychology of ‘conspiracy theories’. “A stunt to destabilise Iran? A Chinese plot to depopulate? Why we fall for fake news and how to debunk dangerous misinformation” runs the subtitle, thus equating ‘conspiracy theories’ with ‘misinformation’. This article doesn’t mention the Anglia Ruskin publication, though it appeared on the same day as the university’s articles in Medical Xpress and Cambridge Network, and it emphasises the same message: “Conspiracy theories are detrimental to your personal health, both mentally and physically” states Professor Douglas. However, there seems to be confusion here, too, on just what a ‘conspiracy theory’ is. Amongst those given are suggestions that Covid-19 can be caught from eating bat soup. They also state: “Followers of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory have even reportedly been promoting a substance dubbed ‘miracle mineral solution’. This ‘cure’ is falsely alleged to help treat everything from autism and cancer to Covid-19 – and contains bleach”. However sensible or ridiculous these ideas may be, it would be difficult to see how they could be described as ‘conspiracy theories’.

The European Commission’s Cordis website, too, carried a similar article, in six languages, headed in English: ‘TRENDING SCIENCE: Why COVID-19 conspiracy theories spread faster than the pandemic’. I find this a strange headline, considering that the governments’ version of events spread virtually instantaneously across the world. Are they really suggesting that ‘conspiracy theories’ are travelling faster than the truth? The article reproduces quotes from Professor Swami, though it doesn’t mention the Swami and Barron paper. One has to wonder at the timing. I also have to wonder at the paragraph:

Changing the mind of a conspiracy believer is practically hopeless: “No, near impossible, particularly if you’re a hardcore believer,” Prof. Swami continued. “They typically reject any evidence that doesn’t fit with their worldview and they only accept evidence that fits with pre-existing beliefs. They will reject anything and say mainly because I’m part of the conspiracy myself. They frame it in such a way that there is no possibility of having a debate. They get into this frame of mind, where they think people who are doing bad things are inherently evil and you don’t want to have a debate with someone who is evil, what you want to do is vanquish evil.

In my own studies of academics who specialise in denouncing ‘conspiracy theorists’ they consistently avoid arguing the facts, and accuse their adversories of doing just that. Instead, they attack the person – arguing ‘ad hominem’, as if everything was due to personality traits and nothing to do with the logical reasoning by which they had arrived at certain conclusions. The above paragraph is a string of regurgitated formulations, rather like George Orwell’s ‘worn-out metaphors’, which have “lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves”, many of which “are used without knowledge of their meaning”.

I also have to wonder why CORDIS would take such an interest in this at this precise moment. Under their ‘About Us’ tab they state: “The Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) is the European Commission’s primary source of results from the projects funded by the EU’s framework programmes for research and innovation (FP1 to Horizon 2020)”.

I decided I would do an analytic study of the Swamy and Barron paper.

Review of Swamy and Barron (2020)

This is a 33 page report, with no Contents list, but the main headings are: Abstract; 1. Introduction; 2. Method; 3. Results; 4. Discussion. There is no Conclusions section, but the tentative conclusions are embodied in the Discussion, though the Discussion is mainly about work by other authors.

The body of the report – the part which describes their own work – is then just Method and Results, which is just 5 pages long. These two sections essentially state that they carried out a survey by questionnaire, asking participants to mark each item in list of statements (an ‘item pool’) on a 7-point scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The first ‘item pool’ consisted of 18 statements about ‘conspiracy theories’ and the second ‘item pool’ related to the respondents’ own personalities. Then they produced some figures purportedly showing correlations. The results are presented as appendices in tabular form. A link to the raw data is given, but that link leads only to a blank page. I asked Viren Swami for access, but haven’t received a reply.

The body of the report relies heavily on reference to statistical methods developed by psychologists. There is no description of how the questions were selected and framed, or of any possibility of leading questions, leading to biasing in the responses. So apart from the psychostatistical models described, there is little or nothing of substance regarding psychology or medicine in the description of the experiment.

The first ‘item pool’ contains the term ‘conspiracy theory’ in every item. As every professor of psychology will be aware, ‘conspiracy theory’ is a term carrying negative connotations; it is a term of denigration, and so one should expect a certain biasing in the responses. Furthermore, each of these statements contains another negative concept, thus reinforcing the negativity, as can be seen in the underlined expressions in the list of statements, as reproduced here:

-> People who believe conspiracy theories about the epidemic are misguided.
-> Conspiracy theories about the epidemic only causing confusion and uncertainty.
-> The sharing of conspiracy theories at this time is irresponsible.
-> I do not believe any of the conspiracy theories of the epidemic that I have come across.
-> This is not the time to be engaging in conspiracy theories about the epidemic.
-> I think conspiracy theories about the epidemic have some truth to them.
-> Conspiracy theories about the epidemic usually do not make much sense.
-> I feel angry when I see people sharing conspiracy theories about the epidemic.
-> People who share conspiracy theories about the epidemic are untrustworthy.
-> The authorities should do more to clamp down on people who share conspiracy theories about the epidemic.
-> Conspiracy theories about the epidemic are a cause for concern.
-> People who share conspiracy theories about the epidemic are acting selfishly.
-> People or organisations who share conspiracy theories about the epidemic should be punished in some way.
-> I find it disgusting that some people believe conspiracy theories about the epidemic.
-> Conspiracy theories about the epidemic are endangering lives.
-> Conspiracy theories about the epidemic are making it difficult to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
-> Conspiracy theories about the epidemic are a cause of public disorder.
-> Some people are spreading conspiracy theories for political or financial gain.

It can also be seen from that list that the majority of the statements are not about ‘conspiracy theories’ as such, but about the people who hold them. Only numbers 6 and 7 are explicitly about the ‘conspiracy theories themselves’, whereas 11 and 17 are ambiguous, in that they could be referring to the spreading of ‘conspiracy theories’, and so implicating the people involved, or they could be referring to the truth of the ‘conspiracy theories’. In that sense number 6 would be interpreted as ‘Research findings about the epidemic are a cause for concern’ and ‘Research findings about the epidemic are a cause of public disorder’. I’m sure that interpretation would find widespread acceptance amongst those who have been questioning what they were being told by the mainstream media about the spread of CoronaVirus. In that sense I would have given 17 a low rating at the time, but a high rating if the statement had been put in the future tense, because I think that when the truth comes out there is every possibility of public disorder.

The second ‘item pool’ contains 42 items divided into four parts: analytic thinking, intuition, emotionality, and imagination. However, they use only the 12-item analytic thinking set in this research paper. They don’t explain why they threw the rest of the data away. This, in a scientific report, does need explaining, because the reason may have been cherry-picking of the data in order to obtain the desired results. They say that an overall score was computed as the mean of all 12 items, with higher scores reflecting a stronger analytic thinking style.

However, they don’t reproduce the 12 items, as they did for the first ‘item pool’, but they say it “assesses individual differences in the tendency to solve problems through understanding of logical principles and the evaluation of evidence”, giving one example of “I enjoy problems that require hard thinking”. Without access to that data, and in the absence of any analysis of that data, no assessment of this can take place. I have to wonder though what different personalities would strongly affirm the given item. My mind goes back to a landlady I had when I was an MSc Physics student in 1968. Her main objective each day seemed to be to complete the Daily Telegraph crossword. Her main point of self-identity seemed to be the fact that she went to Rodean School, Britain’s top private boarding school for girls, which in her mind put her above the hoi poloi. When I first arrived, before I had taken my coat off, she said, “I must show you this”. It was an Australian five-pound-note with her cousin’s signature on it. Her favourite saying when confronted with a scientific problem was, “I suppose it’s the osmotic pressure, you know”. She’d almost certainly have given that item a 7. I’m not sure what I’d have given it, because I’m motivated by curiosity rather than status. She thought I was good at tackling crossword clues when she asked me ones that she couldn’t do; I thought I was useless. She’d have been useless at Physics.

In a third ‘item pool’ they “asked participants to self-report their compliance to four activities adapted from the Cabinet Office’s (2020) list of mandated requirements for social-distancing, which were in place on April 9-10, 2020”. These were:

-> Only going outside for food, health reasons, or work (only if you cannot work from home).
-> Staying 2 metres (6 feet) away from other people when you have to go out.
-> Washing your hands regularly and as soon as you return home.
-> Not meeting other people, including family and friends, you do not share a home with.

Again, this was self-reporting. There was no consideration of what pressures the respondents were under. I comply with all four, but my main reason for complying with 1 and 4 is family pressures. My main reason for complying with 3 is that I tend to do that anyway, and my main reason for complying with 2 is out of courtesey to other people. I don’t believe that the main reason for the government’s restrictions on our freedom is medical.

They then produced figures for correlations between analytic thinking, rejection of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and compliance with mandated requirements. The conclusions, as laid out at the beginning of the Discussion section, are:

In the present study, we hypothesised that greater analytic thinking would be directly associated with greater compliance with mandated requirements for social-distancing that were in place in the United Kingdom in early April 2020, as well as indirectly via the rejection of COVID-19 conspiracy theories. The results of our mediation analysis supported our hypotheses: in a nationally representative sample of adults in the United Kingdom, we found evidence of significant direct and indirect associations between analytic thinking and compliance.

So they found what they were looking for.

Wonderful ambiguity

However, they omit to say what they mean by ‘conspiracy theory’, which is crucial to drawing any proper conclusions from the report. More important than that is the question of what the participants in the survey understood by ‘conspiracy theory’, and whether or not they themselves had a clear idea of what they understood. Then there’s a further question of what people understand by ‘rejection of conspiracy theories’ and ‘belief in conspiracy theories’. The implication here is that there are two groups of people, one of which rejects all conspiracy theories, and one of which accepts all conspiracy theories. No-one as far as I am aware admits to ‘believing in conspiracy theories’, but from time to time I’ve been told by people “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories”. So the two propositions are not mutually complementary. What do people mean when they say “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories”? Do they mean “I don’t believe in conspiracies?”. If so, then why don’t they say that? Obviously, such a proposition would be absurd.

Although the authors do not give a definition of ‘conspiracy theory’, they do give two examples, when they state: “Conspiracy theories about COVID-19 – such as claims that it is caused by electromagnetic waves transmitted by 5G telephone masts or that governments are intentionally causing panic in order to introduce draconian population-control measures – have spread quickly in the past several months (Depoux et al., 2020; Kouzy et al., 2020), with about one in five respondents in the United States and United Kingdom believing in such theories.

I looked up the references. ‘Depoux et al., 2020’ is headed ‘The pandemic of social media panic travels faster than the COVID-19 outbreak’. It is about ‘misleading rumours and conspiracy theories about the origin’. They state, “A striking particularity of this crisis is the coincidence of virology and virality: not only did the virus itself spread very rapidly, but so did the information – and misinformation – about the outbreak, and thus the panic that it created among the public”. Clearly, they are associating ‘conspiracy theories’ with misinformation. “Misinformation causes confusion and spreads fear, thereby hampering the response to the outbreak”, they report the Director General of the World Health Organisation as saying. This is strange, considering that the world-wide fear and panic has undoubtedly been brought about by the mainstream media instantaneously reaching wide swathes of the public with government statements and statements from the WHO. So is that what is meant by ‘conspiracy theory’ in the Swamy and Barron paper?

The second paper they refer to doesn’t even mention ‘conspiracy theory’ but is entirely about ‘misinformation’. Indeed, it is headed ‘Coronavirus goes viral: Quantifying the COVID-19 misinformation epidemic on Twitter’. So why would Swamy and Barron cite that paper, unless they equated ‘conspiracy theory’ with ‘misinformation’. The implication, again, is that true information is supplied by the mainstream media, and misinformation is supplied by social media.

So I searched for any definition of ‘conspiracy theory’ previously published by either of the authors, and found a paper by Viren Swami headed ‘Social Psychological Origins of Conspiracy Theories: The Case of the Jewish Conspiracy Theory in Malaysia’. This threw in a further conundrum of whether ‘Jewish Conspiracy Theory’ is ‘conspiracy theory’ believed in by Jews, as one might expect from normal linguistic analyis, or ‘conspiracy theory’ about Jews, as one might be led to by the context. Again, the woolliness of the language I find worrying. In the first paragraph I found a definition, supported by a self-reference:

A related aspect of this literature concerns belief in conspiracy theories, defined as a subset of false narratives in which the ultimate cause of an event is believed to be due to a malevolent plot by multiple actors working together (Goldberg, 2001; Barkun, 2003; Bale, 2007; Swami and Furnham, 2012a). Although this definition of a conspiracy theory is not exhaustive, it does capture the crux of most such beliefs, including the suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy and that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were allowed to happen by high-ranking officials in the United States government.

So here the author is stating that a ‘conspiracy theory’ is both a ‘subset of narratives’ and is false. So presumably if the JFK ‘conspiracy theory’ turns out either not to have been a ‘subset of narratives’, or false, then it would not be a ‘conspiracy theory’. But then they say that that definition is not exhaustive. That can only mean that it is not a definition, but just a description. That is no proper basis for a scientific paper.

I was led to that paper by an article in The Psychologist, the periodical of The British Psychological Society, headed ‘New Voices: Are conspiracy theories just harmless fun?’. Under a subheading ‘What is a conspiracy theory?’ they write: “Conspiracy theories can be defined in a variety of ways, and it appears each scholar refers to their own definition. …”. I find this surprising for a professional body representing scientists who regard ‘conspiracy theories’ as a core topic of their research. Given that situation, it is encumbent on an author to define the term before using it, rather than relying on a standard definition. This is normal scientific practice.

Further evidence of loose use of language lies later in the same paragraph, in which they give an example of ‘conspiracy theories’ as “theories suggesting the 9/11 attacks were planned”. Does anyone doubt that those attacks were planned? The article is preceded by a photo of Osama bin Laden (the thinner-faced one). Does that meant that they consider President Bush’s narrative as a ‘conspiracy theory’. Such cavalier use of language when dealing with academic papers concerning serious health issues should be of great concern.

The same paragraph continues: “Further, these events have also been shown to be accompanied by several contradictory conspiracy theories. …”. Should that surprise anyone? Any normal scientific process will involve mutually contradictory ideas. The implication here is that the expectation is that some people will believe a number of mutually contradictory ‘conspiracy theories’, and others will ‘not believe in conspiracy theories’. This seems to be the basic assumption in the Swami and Barron paper. Of course, this is baseless. Then the paragraph states: “It is also important to note that some conspiracy theories have been proven to be true”. So a ‘conspiracy theory’ can be true. I have to wonder at this confusion; I think of the British constitution, whose amazing flexibility relies heavily on its wonderful ambiguity.

Then another problem arises when the plural form, ‘conspiracy theories’ is used. Does anyone believe in more than one conspiracy in the case of COVID-19? People who believe in one conspiracy are unlikely to believe in another conspiracy for the same event. I recently wrote four articles for The Truthseeker related to CoronaVirus, in which I put together information which suggested that there may have been a leak, intentional or not, in Wuhan, possibly arising from the Pirbright laboratory in the area of Wuhan. I didn’t write about the possibility of 5G microwaves causing the outbreak, because I hadn’t investigated that area sufficiently to be persuaded of anything in that respect. A microwave engineer is likely to strongly reject such an idea from the knowledge that 5G involves three wavebands, only one of which is above 20GHz, which is the frequency range said to be damaging to the human immune system. That highest band will not penetrate walls, and so would be useless for domestic uses, such as mobile phones. It is therefore unlikely that that highest band has yet been widely implemented. Whatever the truth behind this is, it is likely that such a microwave engineer would respond in the questionnaire negatively with regard to ‘conspiracy theories’ in the case of COVID-19. Microwave engineers are analytical thinkers. Certainly my late brother was, and he wrote the book on Microwave and Radio Frequency Power Measurement. So by lumping all ‘conspiracy theories’ together Swami and Barron are confusing the issue, and undoubtedly biasing the result in favour of ‘rejecting conspiracy theories’ by analytical thinkers in their survey. In fact, whenever there are competing ‘conspiracy theories’ for a particular event, it is unlikely that more than one of them will be true, though mor than one may contain a partial truth.

So if in fact the point of Swami and Barron’s paper is to find out about attitudes to misinformation, then why don’t they call it that? That brings into question the issue of who is to be the arbiter of true information and misinformation. They seem to assume that mainstream information is true information, and that any misinformation is distributed through social media.

A more rational and straight-forward approach would clearly be to ask people whether they believe what they are being told by governments and the mainstream mass media on specific issues. I know that when I go out for a walk in my area of West Yorkshire and get into conversation on CoronaVirus, if I say “There’s something they’re not telling us”, they all say, “I know”, or words to that effect. A more useful approach to Swamy and Barron’s work would have been to find out what type of person tends to believe whatever they are told by official sources, and what type of person tends to question what they are told. This may depend on personality or training, or it may depend on the importance of losing one’s reputation, or of keeping one’s job. I was once at a seminar of journalists, in which one participant told us that in the BBC they were told not to check the facts of a story if it came from official sources. I suspect that something similar might apply to some university departments of psychology.

The very use of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ shows a wooliness in thinking, which undermines the idea of research into ‘Analytic Thinking’ as announced in the title of the work. I think every professor of psychology must be aware of George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, because it is so central to the psychology of political thought and propaganda. In that essay, George Orwell wrote: “The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer”.

Health implications

There was nothing in this research to link belief in ‘conspiracy theories’ with health implications. In the quotes I give below I have underlined the active verbal elements, in order to show how speculative their narrative is. The abstract stated, “These results may have important implications for practical policy aimed at promoting greater compliance with mandated social-distancing.”. The Introduction dealt in some length with previous papers on a possible link between ‘conspiracy theories’ and health, beginning with “The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic presents a serious threat to physical and mental well-being worldwide”, but they follow this on with the direct health threat from the virus, with no suggestion that the health implications could be linked to ‘conspiracy theories’. Then they say, “While the effectiveness of these measures and their impact on mental well-being continues to be discussed …”, which adds nothing to knowledge of any health risks.

On the direct question of health implications of COVID-19 ‘conspiracy theories’ they state:

In turn, such beliefs may lead people to resort to potentially harmful remedies, to dismiss official guidance to prevent the spread of COVID-19, or to deliberately engage in risky behaviour that spreads the virus (Pennycook et al., 2020). For example, it is conceivable that individuals who believe that COVID-19 is caused not by a virus but rather by electromagnetic waves may take fewer precautions to comply with social-distancing and instead engage in action aimed at the perceived source of the threat (e.g., by setting fire to 5G telephone masts and thus endangering not just national infrastructure but also the lives of others; Waterson & Hern, 2020).

Both sentences in the above paragraph are speculative, the active verbal elements being respectively ‘may’ and ‘is conceivable’. The first reference they give matches two references in the references list. The first one is titled ‘Fighting COVID 19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention’. The text in this reference mentions ‘conspiracy theories’ only once: “In the case of COVID-19, this misinformation comes in many forms – from conspiracy theories about the virus being created as a biological weapon in China to claims that coconut oil kills the virus”. This gives us two further examples of what are claimed as ‘conspiracy theories’. Since the idea of a biological weapon in China comes from the President of the USA, it is difficult to see why that is considered to be a ‘conspiracy theory’ when the idea that the attacks of 9-11 was carried out by 19 Semites funded by Osama bin Laden isn’t. The idea of coconut oil killing the virus being a ‘conspiracy theory’ baffles me. It seems that the terms ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘misinformation’ are being used synonymously. I see no analysis in any of these psychology papers of the truth or otherwise of different ideas behind the origin of COVID-19. As regards health implications, that paper mentions only as the last sentence: “We hope that social media platforms will consider this approach in their efforts to combat the spread of health misinformation”. This paper has not been peer reviewed.

The second ‘Pennycook et al., 2020’ reference is actually dated 2019, not 2020 as stated in the references list, and is not about health aspects either.

The final reference in the quoted paragraph, ‘Waterson & Hern, 2020’, is a newspaper article about the vandalisation of 5G equipment in the belief that 5G microwaves are linked to the CoronaVirus epidemic. There is nothing in that report about ‘conspiracy theories’ in themselves bringing health risks. The cited text from Swamy and Barron’s paper therefore seems to me to be based on thin air.

They then state: “Indeed, the large body of research on the psychology of conspiracy theories prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (for reviews, see Douglas et al., 2017; Goreis & Voracek, 2019; Swami & Furnham, 2014) has highlighted the link between belief in conspiracy and a range of negative health behaviours and intentions (e.g., Oliver & Wood, 2014)”. All the subsequent mentions of health effects supposedly brought about by COVID-19 ‘conspiracy theories’ predate the appearance of COVID-19. Since the concept of ‘conspiracy theories’ has not only not been defined, but is woolly, I see no basis on which such a generalisation can be applied to any specific thought that is considered by Swamy and Barron to be a ‘conspiracy theory’. It’s like saying that medical advice damages your health, rather than saying that sometimes medical advice can be wrong and result in damage to a patient’s health.

I have to conclude that any derivation from this paper of any particular ‘conspiracy theory’ bringing about harm to the proponants’ health is not only speculative, but also vacuous.

Effects of lockdown on health

The text put out by Anglia Ruskin University would I think imply to any normal reader that the university research team had carried out a study of the effects on health of COVID-19 ‘conspiracy theories’. Even bearing in mind the nebulous way in which ‘conspiracy theory’ is used, I see no evidence from that report of any research into the health risks undertaken by that research team. A study on the health risks would need to consider the relative health risks of conformance with government measures and non-conformance. That includes the risks of social isolation, of reluctance to visit a hospital for fear of COVID-19 infection, and the effect of hospitals diverting resources from other areas in order to prepare for an influx of COVID-19 patients. None of these considerations seems to have been looked at.

In April, 2020, a YouTube video of a press conference held by two practising virologists, initially broadcast on a local television station in California, went viral, before being taken down by YouTube. It was retrieved by Off-Guardian, who reposted it on BitChute. Their posting states: “The two doctors, who own and run a clinic in Bakersfield, report that – according to their results – a higher than expected percentage of people are infected with the coronavirus, but that the vast majority show no symptoms. This is in line with other studies done at Stanford University and by Japanese scientists in China.” The two linked papers are academic papers awaiting peer review. “If true, the danger of the virus may have been greatly exaggerated by the media, and shelter in place orders/lockdown policies could – through poverty, suicide and stress – potentially cause more damage than they prevent”, states Off-Guardian.

The two doctors – trained practising virologists Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, also stated that hospital doctors were being pressured by hospital administrators to put COVID-19 on the death certificates of anyone who had died having been tested postive, whether or not that was a co-morbility. It is normal, they explained, for dying patients to have a number of co-morbilities, which may contribute to their deaths, but are not normally put on the death certificates. They also talked about the reduction in hospital services for conditions other than COVID-19, and explained that there were a lot of secondary effects that weren’t being talked about. “So some of these things, from what we’ve studied in immunology, microbiology aren’t really meshing with what we know, as people with scientific minds that read this stuff every day. So, that’s kinda how we started”, they explained. They gave figures for other parts of the US, and for the US as a whole, and for some other countries, and showed that they were essentially comparable with those of normal occurences of winter flu.

They also explained the concept of ‘herd immunity’, by which interaction amongst the population stimulates the immune system into resisting the main viruses that it comes into contact with, which goes some way to providing immunity to variants on those viruses, whilst the specific immunity to the variants builds up. Lockdown, they explained, will likely result in a low immunity amongst the public, so that when they intermix again people will be more vulnerable to all sort of viral attacks.

These two specialists are not isolated in their views. Off-Guardian has published three articles containing quotes from other virologists and epidemiologists, saying compatible things at different stages of the pandemic: 24 March|: ‘12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic’; 28 March: ‘10 MORE Experts Criticising the Coronavirus Panic’; 17 April: ‘8 MORE Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic’ One of these experts managed to publish an article in The Spectator on 29 March. He is Professor John Lee, a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist, who explained why the figures for Covid-19 infections are a vast underestimate, and why Covid-19 deaths are a substantial over-estimate. This article was compatible with the story being revealed at the California press conference, so how is it that a story that can make it to one of the UK’s best known current affairs periodicals is censored from YouTube?

I’ve written about these expert opinions, and more, including a mathematical review of the Imperial College work, and journalists in the mainstream media who have spoken out, in my previous four articles relating to the pandemic in The Truthseeker: 25 March: ‘The Crown’s Viral Power Grab’; 4 April: ‘Colonial Pandemonium’; 11 April: ‘Science, Fake Science and Political Science’; 12 April: ‘Zion’s Den of Thieves’.

Whether or not all these experts are correct, there is sufficient evidence that such issues should be central to any legitimate university research into the effects of ‘conspiracy theories’ on health. To ignore such issues would in my view be irresponsible, and in the current situation of world lockdown, wreckless. Whatever the excuses of the professors, it would be hard to justify in any way the peddling of their research paper by the university authorities, as an academic study on the health issues resulting from ‘conspiracy theories’ relating to COVID-19.

There is now widespread talk of people with other illnesses not receiving hospital treatment, either through fear of going to see their doctors because of the risk of catching COVID-19, or because of the diversion of resources in hospitals to the expected wave of COVID-19 cases.

There has been deep concern and controversy in New York over the treatment of COVID-19 patients in hospitals. One particularly emotional case was nurse Jennifer Stelmach Conicelli, who the day after a nervous breakdown went public on ‘forced COVID deaths’. She was talking about ‘black guys’. “Let me try to put this into context for you. I know – I’m not f- green – I know that not everybody is going to live … but these people aren’t dying from COVID”. She gave some examples of them “medically mismanaging their patients”. “I literally don’t know what to do any more”, she said, “Everyone here is OK with this. The only way I can kinda put this into context for everybody is … is like, if we were in a …. and they were like taking the Jews to put them in a gas chamber I’m the one right there saying, ‘Hey, this is not good. This is bad. This is wrong. We should not be doing this’, and then everyone tells me, ‘Hang on there. You’re doing a great job. You can’t save everybody’. You know, ‘You’re amazing. You’re a great nurse’ … What I need is someone to help me save these people from being killed, OK, from gross negligence and complete medical mismanagement. And no-one is listening to me”. She asked whether she was the only one who isn’t a sociopath, who thinks it’s OK. “No-one’s listened to anyone’s lungs as long as I’ve been here”, she said, “I tried contacting a newspaper; nobody called me back”. The last thing she needs is a professor of psychology telling her she’s a ‘conspiracy theorist’, possibly asking her, ‘Do you feel in control?’. Yes, I once heard a professor of psychology denigrating ‘conspiracy theorists’ as not feeling in control.

One New York city physician, Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell, suggested that ventilator protocols may need revisiting. He put it this way: “One of the reasons I speak up, and I hope people at the bedside speak up, is that I think there may be a disconnect between those who are seeing these patients directly, who are sensing that something is not quite right, and those brilliant people and res”.

In the UK I’ve heard a fair amount of talk on the radio about a drop in hospital treatment for other conditions, whether through reluctance to go to hospitals, or through diversion of resources. Strangely, when I come to search for that I don’t see much at all. The best report I found was in the website of the World Socialist Web in an article headed ‘UK: Delays to medical treatment during pandemic will cost thousands of lives’ of 2 May. This article states: “According to the Royal College of Surgeons more than 2 million operations were cancelled as the NHS released 12,000 beds for patients struck down by COVID-19. … As referrals and treatments are delayed, doctors fear that lives which could have been saved will be lost. Dr Clive Peedell, NHS Consultant Clinical Oncologist, told ITV News, ‘The mortality rate from cancer will go up, what percentage I can’t say, I would say a minimum of 5 percent increase in cancer mortality…’ ”.

To find more information on this I found the best way was to search for ‘COVID-19’ and the specific disease. In the case of cancer, I found an article in The Lancet, which stated: “In a climate of fear and mandated avoidance of all but essential clinical services, delays in patient, population, and health-care system responses to suspected cancer symptoms seem inevitable”.

The Office of National Statistics in the UK have been monitoring personal well-being and economic well-being covering, “to understand the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on people and households in Great Britain”. Their report on 4 May 2020 was summarised by a BBC News reported headed ‘Coronavirus: Money worries in pandemic drive surge in anxiety’. “Nearly half of people in Britain experienced “high anxiety” as the country’s lockdown began, an Office for National Statistics survey suggests”, the article stated. The survey “found the average reported anxiety level rose from 2.97 out of 10 at the end of 2019 to 5.18 at the end of March as the lockdown was beginning”.

All of these consequences, and more, were foreseeable at the time that the Anglia Ruskin University went public on the Swamy and Barron paper. They would all have needed researching, if that paper had really been about health effects resulting from ‘conspiracy theories’. The evidence in fact is suggesting that the deaths resulting from believing what the public is being told by the government and the mainstream media may actually be greater than deaths resulting directly from COVID-19 itself. However speculative that idea may be, it would need to be investigated in any research which could draw a conclusion that disbelieving official sources would result in greater deaths.

I have put special effort into analysing this one paper, because it seems to be part of a network of papers produced by professors of psychology who specialise in denigrating ‘conspiracy theories’, and much of what applies to that paper will apply to some extent or other to the network as a whole. The obvious influence of fake science on this global lockdown, or partial lockdown, is now so evident that universities need to be held to account. The status of universities and of university professors as purveyros of the truth in the public mind is high. What I am seeing in such ‘ad hominem’ abuse of people who speak out against authority is an abuse of trust. Ultimately, the reputations of universities and of professional institutes in the areas of psychology and related disciplines is at risk, unless quality control is tightened up, and rogue professors weeded out.