A Few Friendly Questions for H1N1 Conspiracy Theorists

I’m sick. I’ve got a fever, chills, body aches, headache, and fatigue. In short, I feel like crap. Am I mentioning this to get sympathy? You bet. There is nothing good about being sick except for that “ahhh, poor baby” you get from friends, family, and even occasionally strangers. So, yeah, I’ll take the sympathy where I can get it.

But that’s actually not the main reason I’m mentioning that I’m sick. When you have flu symptoms these days, the first thing people ask you is “H1N1?” And boy, does that topic stir up a lot of ugly stuff. It’s packed with as much fear, conspiracy, misunderstanding, and convoluted reasoning as a Dan Brown novel (and not in a good way).

I won’t address all of the ugly stuff in this blog entry. I don’t want to waste all that precious fodder in one essay. So I’ll tackle my favorite H1N1 issue:

The H1N1 vaccine is a conspiracy to do something heinous, such as make us all sick or put us all into camps.

Now, I’ll admit right off, I’m not a huge fan of conspiracy theories. Not only do I think they’re overly complicated (I get bored after drawing two or three connections), I find them to be a little judgmental. They frequently have that condescending tone that teenagers affect when their parents don’t get the latest pop culture reference. You know, that “OMG, what non-loser doesn’t know that piece of obviousness?” tone. I don’t appreciate getting that tone from anyone, not even if that anyone has the credentials of Einstein and the following of Jesus.

That said, I do try to give these claims as fair a shake as I can, ‘cause as the old saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

So over the past month or so, I’ve read through some of the more choice H1N1 fears. As I’ve done so, some questions keep popping into my head.

1) Who are these conspiracy theorists and the experts they quote, and why should I believe them? Why should I believe they have my best interests at heart, that they are on the up and up, that they aren’t in this for something? Don’t they have something to gain by my believing them? And what about credentials? How do they know what they know? They often quote 'researchers' and 'studies' but where are the specific references that I can use to check these 'researchers' and 'studies' out myself?

2) Why would the government (or corporations) want to confine us or make us sick? Cause they're just downright evil? What do they stand to gain? Power? Control? Wouldn’t they have just as much to gain if we were all healthy, out and about, earning money and spending it and paying our taxes? Greedy corporate wolves and power hungry politicians wouldn't go to all that trouble for nothing, would they? Motive matters. What would theirs be?

3) Let's say the government (and/or corporations) are out to grab more power. Why choose a difficult, high-profile, certain-to-get-people-all-worked-up tactic? Certainly, there are simpler, more surreptitious ways to control us, ways that we wouldn't even notice or might even welcome. Why not choose something like that? Or why do anything at all? One could easily argue that our apathy does a fine job of surrendering control to the powers that be. And that stuff's way cheap.

It’s super easy (and actually kinda fun!) to come up with horror stories about government or corporate conspiracies. And the H1N1 scare lends itself beautifully to them. But just because something is easy to believe doesn’t make it true. Believe me, I wish it did. It’s super easy to believe I’m going to be Johnny Depp’s lover one day, but we all know that ain’t gonna happen in this (or any, says my husband) lifetime.

So when an H1N1 viral conspiracy video shows up on your Facebook page, ask my questions. See what answers you come up with. What do you have to lose?