Living through a global pandemic has spawned endless speculation on our health, and proven fertile ground for conspiracy theorists out to disprove everything from the safety of vaccines to the existence of the covid-19 virus itself. But medical conspiracies predate the pandemic, and we’ll take a look at a few below.

Watch out! Big, bad, greedy, pharma is out to get you: Conspiracy theorists claim that big pharmaceutical companies with the likes of Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer seek to treat diseases rather than cure them, meaning that their drugs aim to eliminate the symptoms of a disease instead of straight-up getting rid of it. The incentive: get consumers to buy the drug over the course of their lives and not just once, ultimately bringing in more money. But, as you probably guessed, it’s simply not true: developing treatments instead of cures is a losing strategy. That’s because the pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive, so drugs merely controlling a disease will always get blown out of the water by others that can cure it. Case in point, ribavirin/interferon therapy has been used to treat Hepatitis C for decades now, but when Sovaldi — a drug that cures the disease developed by Gilead Science— made it on the market in 2013, it had the most lucrative drug launch of its time bringing in USD 8.5 bn in the first nine months following its release.

Modifying genes ought to be “bad,” right? Well, conspiracy theories have led the vast majority of people to believe so, claiming that genetically modified crops are harmful to both humans and the environment. It all started when scientists first claimed that GMOs are more susceptible to diseases, thus making us use more pesticides to keep plantations safe. But the theory got out of hand, with some claiming that the modified crops are being used to reduce African men’s fertility and eliminate Africans from the world population. These outlandish claims are all backed up by pseudo-science; it turns out that fertility rates and crops have nothing to do with each other. But the basis of the conspiracy theory itself has been disproven with studies showing that GMOs are no more susceptible to diseases than their non-modified counterparts. On the contrary, crops are genetically modified to make them more resistant to pathogens.

Ummm…. But where did covid-19 come from? It came from the bats, it came from the labs; people everywhere seem to have an opinion on this matter. On the one hand, the bat theory claims that the virus was transmitted from bats to humans when someone ate soup containing an infected bat in a Wuhan market in China. On the other hand, the lab conspiracy argues that the virus was manufactured in a Wuhan laboratory as a bioweapon to help China take over the world. The truth is, we don’t actually know for sure where the virus came from, after a fact finding ed-inform.net to Wuhan earlier this year came away empty-handed.

A special shout out to anti-vaxxers, the bane of our existence: One of the major obstacles to achieving worldwide vaccination. By putting everyone at risk of contracting the virus, anti-vaxxers are not only harming themselves but are harming society as a whole. So why are they refusing to get vaccinated? There are a variety of reasons: some claim that the vaccine contains 5G-powered-microchips designed to track them, others believe that the vaccine might be unsafe to take and ineffective. Some even go as far as denying the existence of a pandemic. In any case, the theories contradict peer-reviewed studies that have proven that the covid-19 jab doesn’t have long-term adverse effects. Ultimately, a vaccine may be the only way of getting rid of covid-19 once and for all.