Investigative journalist David Gardner turns his uncompromising gaze on the many conspiracy theories connected with the COVID pandemic. With first-hand reporting and detailed investigations into the people who originated these COVID theories – some of them plausible, some driven by an agenda, and some plainly mad – he answers the questions that everyone has been asking for nearly two years since the pandemic began, and left us doubting our leaders as never before.
When COVID-19 struck early in 2020, first in China and inexorably through the rest of the world, it quickly became the subject of the most virulent outbreak of conspiracy theories we have ever seen. The pandemic quickly became an infodemic.
The President of the United States championed bleach as a cure, the Chinese government blamed the Americans, and the American government blamed the Chinese – a Cold War over a cold virus. David Icke said that COVID does not exist. People blamed 5G phone networks, genetically modified crops, Bill Gates, Corona beer, aliens, bats and pangolins . . .
Yet these theorists are not all the obsessive cultists and paranoid mavericks with whom the conspiracy-theory label is often associated. They are your parents, your next-door neighbour, your boss at work. The question marks over the origins of COVID-19, the dangers of the virus.
The world has been changed for ever by the events of the past two years. It is crucial that history offers an accurate account of what happened. This book will play a key role in revealing what – and what not – to believe.
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David Gardner is a best-selling author and journalist, who worked as an editor with Newsweek until 2021. He also worked for the Daily Mail as a crime writer and senior foreign correspondent, filing dispatches from war-torn Beirut, covering the first Gulf War – he was the first British print journalist into Baghdad – and travelling around the world on assignments for the award-winning newspaper. He moved to California as the Mail’s Los Angeles correspondent, which saw him cover four presidential elections and all the biggest US stories of the past two decades and worked until recently as the London Evening Standard’s US correspondent. His most recent book, 9/11: The Conspiracy Theories was a Sunday Times bestseller. His other books include The Last of the Hitlers (2001), an account of how he discovered the descendants of the German dictator, The Tom Hanks Enigma (John Blake Publishing, 2007) and Legends: Murder, Lies and Cover-Ups (John Blake Publishing, 2016), in which he investigated some of the most famous celebrity deaths in recent history, including those of President John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Diana, Princess of Wales. He has also written two novels. He divides his time between the UK and LA.