Conspiracy theories are especially popular among those who, for whatever reasons, distrust established authority and institutions. The problem is, such theories generally assume a competence in the function of such authority and institutions than is quite unwarranted by objective observation and the study of history, along with an equally unwarranted view of the discipline of which fallen humanity—apart from Biblical conversion —is capable.
Sometime ago our website published a three-part series on Seventh-day Adventists and conspiracy theories [1], which I still recommend to our readers and all others in the denomination with an interest in this subject. A major problem with such theories is that too many fail to give careful thought to their deeper implications, which is what this article seeks to do.
Conspiracy Theories and the COVID Vaccine Controversy
Debate over the efficacy and wisdom of the various COVID vaccines now in circulation continues to rage on the Internet and social media, among Seventh-day Adventists as well as others. Among Adventists critical of the COVID vaccines, some hold them to be contrary to the prevention-based, natural immunity focus of our classic health message as found in Scripture and the writings of Ellen White. Others, while not dismissing every vaccine as unworkable, believe the COVID vaccines to have been developed too quickly and therefore dangerously risky. Still more see little or no medical harm in the vaccines and respect the choices of those who take them, while at the same time objecting to the mandating of these remedies by government, business, or other entities. Many in this latter group see the issue as involving religious and personal liberty, believing that the decision of what to place in one’s body should belong exclusively to the individual.
But the principal focus of this article is the conspiracy mentality with which certain ones are approaching the COVID vaccine controversy. Basic to this mindset is the notion that for various and allegedly nefarious reasons, civil and medical authorities and the mainstream media are supposedly hiding the vaccines’ negative consequences from the public. Fundamental to this notion is the assumption that ubiquitous and powerful forces are somehow able to impose uniform—or near uniform—discipline on their underlings and thus prevent the leaking of these troublesome facts.
The question of whether such allegations are credible is relevant not only to conspiratorial claims regarding the COVID vaccines, their distribution, and their supposed hurtful impact, but also to many other conspiracy theories and what they suggest regarding the operation of human institutions, unconverted humanity’s capacity to curtail selfish urges, and the efficiency of human behavior.
Negative News and the Lure of Fame and Fortune
An Adventist evangelist said many years ago that the big problem with the Biblical gospel is that it’s good news—that if only it were bad news, the work of God would have been finished long ago! This is because bad news is much more titillating to the fallen human mind than good news. As I’ve said so often, if a Congressman and his wife celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary, it won’t even make the small print. But if that same Congressman gets caught in an extramarital affair, it will be breaking news on all the networks, whatever the networks’ ideological biases might be.
I don’t bring this up to invite political controversy; we try very hard on this site to avoid addressing strictly political issues or discussing political personalities. But facts are still facts, and one unassailable fact is that those most critical of the mainstream media are often those who pay the least attention to it. This was demonstrated very recently when I heard a fellow church member claim that the mainstream media never reports sexual scandal when it’s committed by politicians belonging to the Democratic Party. But regardless of one’s partisan or philosophical leanings, the above statement is simply false, a falsehood made manifest by such cases as those of the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, former Senators Gary Hart and Brock Adams, former U.S. President Bill Clinton—and more recently, former Senator Al Franken, former Congresswoman Katie Hill, former North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Cal Cunningham, former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Extremism often plays on the ignorance of its acolytes, and when people become convinced through various means that mainstream news sources are lying to them and that only “safe” sources—those espousing their beliefs, of course—can be trusted, they are easily rendered vulnerable to unsound assumptions, outright lies, and a fabricated reality. Isolation from world events produces ignorance of the dynamics that typically govern those events. Such ignorance can cause people to accept wildly absurd explanations for what goes on in the world.
Despite the insistence of certain ones to the contrary, it is fair to say that the quest for ratings, not an ideological agenda, drives for the most part the choices and content of the mainstream media. And as people are more interested in bad news than good news, the former gets reported more readily than the latter, regardless of who or what it concerns. Neither honesty nor righteousness need be operative here, only expediency. Good news, for most people, is boring. Bad news, by contrast, is interesting. (Those who follow television news will quickly attest to how scandalous reports are generally reserved for the close of a given broadcast, so as to keep viewers watching till the end.)
Conspiracies are not absent from the human experience or the American narrative, as Tammany Hall, Teapot Dome, the Pentagon Papers relative to the Vietnam War, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and many similar incidents bear witness. But the story of these and other conspiracies and scandals reveal a consistent pattern: that the schemes and power of conspirators are never foolproof, that Murphy’s Law—if anything can go wrong, it will—is an ever-present factor in human affairs. Internal whistle-blowers motivated by the lure of notoriety and the promise of multi-million-dollar book deals, a desire to avoid jail—and yes, even conscience—together with journalists out to win a Pulitzer Prize, have always stood ready to rip open the secrecy in which scandal and conspiracy thrive, for the simple reason that the path to fame and fortune in the exposure of such matters promises vastly greater rewards than complicit silence.
What is more, if COVID vaccine critics were truly correct in their allegations of high-level concealment of destructive facts relative to the vaccines, if in fact thousands were getting sick and dying as a result of these hastily-contrived remedies, major lawsuits would be flourishing against the government, medical agencies, even the media, for producing and promoting the vaccines, with huge monetary awards accruing to the injured parties and their loved ones. No secret whose exposure could assure so many of material wealth is going to stay in the shadows in today’s society.
Raw Self-Interest
One of the strongest and soundest arguments used by Christian apologists for the historicity of Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead, is that repeating a lie one knows to be a lie makes no sense if it means getting yourself killed. While many throughout history have in fact died for a lie, one is hard pressed to find people who died for a lie that they knew was a lie. Normally people tell falsehoods to get themselves out of trouble, not into it. Raw self-interest is the decisive motive.
With this in mind, it would make no sense for the overwhelming majority of medical, media, and government figures to deliberately conceal adverse information regarding the COVID vaccine while at the same time getting themselves vaccinated. Urging others to take risks that you yourself refrain from taking is a familiar course chosen by hypocrites, but to actually do something you know to be highly risky, even deadly, to oneself and those near and dear, is quite another matter.
Several decades ago, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, certain ones were alleging that the “facts” about the presumably casual transmission of AIDS—not merely through sex, mind you, but through hand-holding, kissing, mosquito bites, swimming pools, and jacuzzis—was supposedly being hidden from the public by government and medical officials out of deference to the gay rights lobby [2]. You don’t hear this conspiracy theory much anymore, as the passage of time has rendered it obsolete. (Had it been true, death tolls from AIDS would by now have equaled if not surpassed those of the infamous Black Death of 1349.) But the most fundamental problem with alleging a conspiracy like this is that those supposedly concealing the facts would be just as vulnerable to the lethal consequences of their concealment as those they were deceiving. Neither deadly diseases nor dangerous remedies for the same are respecters of persons, which means hiding the facts concerning a risky medical experiment like an inadequately tested vaccine—if indeed this were taking place—would adversely affect the highly placed conspirators concealing the facts as much as it would the public which these “elites” allegedly disdain.
Conclusion
In other words, to allege that governmental, scientific, and media bigwigs are hiding negative information about the COVID vaccines—to which, by taking the vaccines, they have deliberately exposed themselves and their loved ones—defies the primal human instinct for self-preservation. Neither character nor integrity are needed in order to want to stay alive. Whatever one thinks of the average politician, establishment figures in any line, or mainstream media reporters, it’s safe to say very few are interested in committing suicide.
Moreover, if such adverse information regarding the vaccines were truly in existence, there is no way it would stay secret. The incentive to disclose such facts and thus the deception by which they were being hidden would be well-nigh impossible for political figures, enterprising whistle-blowers, and journalists to resist, in light of the material and professional rewards that would accrue for such exposure. For this simple reason, along with many others, conspiracies and scandals rarely if ever escape exposure by mainstream media, political, and other professional sources. Those with any doubts need only ask the likes of Daniel Ellsberg, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein.
REFERENCES
1. Kevin D. Paulson, “Seventh-day Adventists and Conspiracy Theories,” Parts 1-3:
http://advindicate.com/articles/2019/9/20/paulson-draft-1-s88fl-6mlnf-tyf95
http://advindicate.com/articles/2019/9/20/paulson-draft-1-s88fl-6mlnf-49y4n-dkr69-dcwee-sxa65-rr6n4
http://advindicate.com/articles/2019/9/20/paulson-draft-1-s88fl-6mlnf-49y4n-dkr69-dcwee
2. See Gene Antonio, The AIDS Cover-Up? The Real and Alarming Facts About AIDS (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987); Lorraine Day, M.D, AIDS: What the Government Isn’t Telling You (Palm Desert, CA: The Rockford Press, 1991).
Pastor Kevin Paulson holds a Bachelor’s degree in theology from Pacific Union College, a Master of Arts in systematic theology from Loma Linda University, and a Master of Divinity from the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University. He served the Greater New York Conference of Seventh-day Adventists for ten years as a Bible instructor, evangelist, and local pastor. He writes regularly for Liberty magazine and does script writing for various evangelistic ministries within the denomination. He continues to hold evangelistic and revival meetings throughout the North American Division and beyond, and is a sought-after seminar speaker relative to current issues in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He presently resides in Berrien Springs, Michigan