COVID-19 Ebola, H1N1, Spanish flu, yellow fever, the black death, the plague of Athens.

Pandemics are sadly not new to humanity. They've been with us since the beginning and they'll

be with us to the end. And with them have always come conspiracy theories and scapegoats.

All these things that you think are new to COVID-19 with the advent of the internet? Well,

no, they're not. Pandemic conspiracy theories are coming up next on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Pandemic conspiracies

and politics.

2019 saw the rise of a novel coronavirus strain that caused respiratory disease called COVID-19.

By early 2020, COVID-19 was a global pandemic that triggered the largest public health emergency

the world had ever seen, with unprecedented quarantines and lockdowns that spanned entire

continents. Conspiracy theories about the cause of this virus spread online and political

groups leveraged COVID-19 as a political weapon to promote various nationalist causes.

Some said these distasteful responses to the pandemic were previously unheard of, and

that perhaps the existence of the internet is what made this particular pandemic bring

out the worst in some of us. However, a look through the history books reveals that there

is in fact nothing about the 2020 pandemic that hasn't characterized most of the rest of

history's worst disease outbreaks. Today, we're going to look at some of the most infamous

of these cases and compare the conspiracy theories and political weaponizations of centuries

past to those of today. Conspiracy theories were probably the most

predictable offshoot from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the earliest went straight for the

low-hanging fruit and placed the blame on prominent billionaires. Bill Gates was an obvious

target. The Gates Foundation funds a lot of medical research and someone uncovered that

...