The Germ Conspiracy
The Coronaspiracy Part 1 Act 1: It’s Germ Theory — The Movie… only this time it’s for real!
This is a multi-part, multimedia series investigating conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. For each Act, a video (see below) and subsequent essay will offer unique and complementary explorations of each conspiracy. Enjoy!
Down the ‘Rona Hole
Let’s do a vibe check to start with, to see how far down the ‘Rona hole you already are.
Have you heard about Event 201?
What? That’s right: the mock “high-level pandemic” exercise undertaken at Johns Hopkins University in New York.
When? October 18, 2019: a few months (give or take) before an actual pandemic descended upon the world.
Who? The World Economic Forum, partnered with (of course) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Why? Let them explain themselves:
“In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat. Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.”
Actually, maybe this is a better indication of how far down the ‘Rona hole you are: what was your first impression of Event 201, whether learning about it now or previously?
A logical and perfectly innocent event for world leaders to hold in an increasingly viral-laden world — an event whose direct temporal adjacency to the commencement of the largest pandemic in generations shows nothing more than the incredible prescience and foresight of the organisers?
Or: a hidden-in-plain-sight disclosure —an Orange Man-esque act of shameless trolling — by those about to rollout this Plandemic?
This is an important question, because it will dictate your views of every single sub-plot hidden within this pandemic narrative: the virus, the death numbers, the tests, the masks, the lockdowns… and, of course, the Jibby Jab. And it will, thusly, determine the level of disruption to your worldview you may experience if you persist Down the ‘Rona Hole.
Covid News Network
Here is another test, in the form of three articles from CNN (I know, sorry).
From April 2017: Seven reasons we're at more risk than ever of a global pandemic.
From November 2018: The big one is coming, and it’s going to be a flu pandemic.
From September 2019: The risk of a global pandemic is growing -- and the world isn't ready, experts say.
Again, it is up to each digger whether to see this as simply keen discernment from the authors (or more likely the Editors-in-Chief), or as purposeful pandemic preparation of the public psych (I warned you: there will be excessive alliteration Down the ‘Rona Hole). Regardless: they are fascinating to read now, with hindsight, just to appreciate how prescient they were in predicting the events soon to come.
From the first article — the attachment of fear to basic human interactions, and an escalating war against an aggressive, lawless nature:
“It could take just one cough, one kiss, one touch or even one bite to change not only your life, but the lives of everyone around you -- and for months or even years.”
"Infectious diseases respect no boundaries…”
“But with infections disregarding borders and their battle lines against humans drawn… the way we live today is what opens us up to risk.”
From the second article — the threat of viral mutation, the diminishment of natural immunity and the urgent need for new experimental vaccines:
“Unlike seasonal flu, pandemics occur when a completely new or novel virus emerges. This sort of virus can emerge directly from animal reservoirs or be the result of a dramatic series of mutations -- so-called reassortment events -- in previously circulating viruses.
“With pandemic flu, we cannot solely rely on our bodies' ability to fight. A vaccine is our only real hope.”
“Genomic techniques can be used to map the DNA or RNA of a new pathogen, genetically to engineer and mass-produce the same DNA or RNA and then inject it into the human body, leading to the production of antibodies to fight the virus. This method results in a new type of vaccine, a DNA vaccine.”
From the third article — the threat of impending doom, a warning that we are acting too slow without enough urgency; that throwing caution to the wind will be necessary and accepted… and even a curious nod to the potential breeding ground and origins of these new biological threats:
“The chances of a global pandemic are growing -- and we are all dangerously under prepared…”
“While disease, epidemics, and pandemics have always existed, greater population density and the ability to travel anywhere in the world within 36 hours means disease can spread rapidly through a country and then go worldwide.”
“Scientific and technological advancements have helped fight these diseases -- but the WHO report warns they can also provide the laboratory environments for new disease-causing microorganisms to be created, increasing the risk of a future global pandemic.”
Contagion Consciousness
It is a compelling narrative that CNN and other Covid News Networks present, regardless of how manufactured you think it might be. It becomes even more compelling when we find that this narrative is not just present in our news media — pandemics have been an ever present and growing spectre within our entertainment. And this is where things get really interesting.
Most non-millennials would know 12 Monkeys: perhaps not the first, but certainly one of the most potent, Germ Theory propaganda pieces (said with the greatest respect to Bruce and Brad): firmly establishing the emotional link between infectious disease to impending societal armageddon. I distinctly remember how unsettling I found it when I watched it with Dad, quite possibly earlier than was advisable.
The most commercially successful contemporary example is the movie Contagion, from 2011.
It ticks many of the key pandemic boxes: on one hand, the elevation to heroic status of the scientific expert, alongside the relegation of the public to scientifically illiterate citizens who must defer to the dictates of these enlightened lab-coated beings; on the other, the Enemy of the People that is the germ-doubting conspiracy theorist, and its equally contemptible offshoot — the snake-oil-selling alternative medical quack. Other notable mentions include the familiar origin story of Oriental bats; the mutation of the virus in question into a more transmissible strain that lifts the narrative up a notch; as well as the inevitable saviour of a hastily rolled out yet apparently miraculously efficacious Jibby Jab.
Indeed, it has been convincingly argued by several writers that Contagion provides a highly accurate blueprint for how our health bureaucracy would react to our current pandemic, and how it would be accepted by a science-following and expert-trusting public. The main difference is between Contagion and Covid pandemics is that our Covid response actually went further: mass testing and worldwide lockdowns were not considered necessary even in the movie’s apocalyptic leanings.
To what extent have pandemic movies like Contagion become embedded in our collective subconscious. Just ask Matt Hancock — Britain’s Health Secretary up until mid-2021 — who earlier in February made the rather unadvisable admission that the movie had directly influenced his own Jibby Jab policy.
This is a self-evidently ridiculous thing to have happened, it goes without saying, and hence entirely fitting that it did happen; not only did it give a glimpse of just how little relevant expertise political health appointments have, but also a reminder of how much we all unconsciously take our real life cues from entertainment. In fact, just to prove the point, the author of the above Guardian article admits as such himself in the first paragraph:
“Like many people, one of the first things I did after the March lockdown in the UK was watch Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion. I was completely clueless about the nature of infectious diseases, and I was foolish enough to hope that a Hollywood film might provide the answers.”
It is hard not to witness this conditioning play out and conclude that we have been primed by this kind of entertainment for this current pandemic moment — whether this was done deliberately or not is another question.
Predictive Programming and The Plague Story
But, of course, there are plenty more pandemic movies aside from Contagion — in fact, as one becomes aware of just how much entertainment has been devoted to germs, one could also start to wonder if there was some overarching, underlying script from which all of these cultural artefacts are drawing form.
Astonishingly and impressively, a diligent scribe at Vulture strung out a list of 79 (someone check the Numerology on that) “Best Pandemic Movies to Binge in Quarantine”. On top of that, we have multiple TV series along the same lines (including a re-make of 12 Monkeys), with several series that are literally called Pandemic — the most recent of which was released on Netflix in (of course) January 2020, and is particularly brutal in the ridicule it heaps upon the dreaded anti-jibby-jabber.
Actually, there is more. In my own circle of friends, we regularly played out a Pandemic: a rare board game when you actually work collaboratively with your friends (rather than seeking to ruthlessly destroying them) — in this case to try and save the world from the spread of a deadly pathogen. And this game isn’t even recent: it was made in 2008, after being inspired (according to Wikipedia) by the 2002 SARS outbreak. Playing it anew and bringing life to it, over a decade later, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic lockdown, represented a moment of cultural singularity that warrants further consideration.
Do we have before us the conspiracy version of the “Chicken or the Egg” dilemma? How much of our pandemic reality is actually real — a scientifically sound and supported series of events — and how much is just a projection (to channel Freud and Jung) out of our collective unconsciousness: the ever-present and ever-morbidly-fascinating spectre that is Germ Theory, a spectre that our media and entertainment seems intent on ensuring will always be lurking in the shadows?
Clearly, there is something deep and primal in the human condition that is being channeled through this pandemic narrative. Author Simon Sheridan calls this “The Plague Story”, and explains how — particularly through our entertainment industry — this story has become so deeply embedded into Western civilisation, and how it impacted our global response in early 2020. He identifies several key chapters in the formulation of this narrative: beginning in 1722 with Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Year”, up to modern examples like Outbreak and Contagion.
Sheridan suggests that, when the first pandemic first hit, we were faced with a fork in the road: would we choose the Flu Story — where the virus would look scary at first but would eventually fizzle out like most influenza pandemics of the recent past have — or our Plague alternative. Citing primarily the example of a certain Donald J. Trump, he concludes that Western Governments were initially attempting to steer us into the Flu Story, however the more compelling narrative — the one that offered closure to our long running biopic — instead kicked in.
It is a compelling and well-argued thesis on how we have arrived (and stayed) at our current fear-drenched germ-fearing state of being. As committed conspiracy theorists, however, we are obliged to take things a little deeper, and make clear point of contention: the mass acceptance and adoption of The Plague Story was not an innocent occurrence, but a very deliberate and planned outcome. And here is where we need to start pulling out the conspiracy big guns.
Such a hypothesis is explained through the concept “Predictive Programming”: that planned narratives are deliberately seeped out into the collective consciousness through media and entertainment, in order to prepare the public to more readily accept social changes. The creators of The Simpsons in particular have had this claim levelled at them on several occasions — however, once aware of this concept, it is hard not to see it everywhere.
Surely there is no better example of Predictive Programming in our media and entertainment than The Plague Story. Indeed, if this is what some multi-generational, shadowy, probably inbred elite cabal has been planning, one can only tip their hat to a job well done. With decades, even centuries of pandemic propaganda in place, our society was psychologically primed to accept and normalise The Plague Story. All it would take is a perfectly scripted pandemic for the programming to kick in, and that is exactly what seems to have occurred.
12 Monkeys and the Germpocalypse
Time to go one level deeper, and take a look at just how intricate this predictive pandemic programming might be. And for that, we must we must return to our OGs Bruce and Brad in 12 Monkeys.
From one of the earliest scenes — where Bruce’s character is sent up to the contaminated Earth surface, decked out in his next level PPE, before being thoroughly disinfected and injected so that he can re-enter the underground world of the safe and protected — we know that we are in for some hardcore germ theorist porn. This is the full rendering of the Germpocalypse, and it would be fair to say that no piece of popular culture has depicted it more effectively and convincingly than 12 Monkeys.
To be fair, the movie is far more than this. The danger or otherwise of germs is only one of many complex themes intertwined into the plot: mental health, animal rights, time travel… just to name a few.
Yet it remains a pandemic movie at heart. And at its heart is one particularly insidious notion, the same notion found in Contagion and similar Germpocalypse Hollywood pieces: the insanity and danger of denying The Plague Story. The dangers, in the case 12 Monkeys, being the literal pathogen-inspired downfall of humanity.
Most notably, we have our crazy, institutionalised germ-doubting Brad — who, early in the movie, even has the nerve to troll our Boy Bruce about the very premise of Germ Theory. But, more subtly, we also have our leading lady — objectified right from the get-go, with gratuitous and lingering shots of her legs before we even see her face. After starting her narrative as the foolish upstart young professor who smugly sneers at those warning of impending Germpocalypse, she ends as the true believer: desperately urging on a doubting and wavering Bruce in that final epic airport scene.
Leaving aside the efforts of the leading duo, why is 12 Monkeys so effective and convincing? Well, to quote the heat Australian movie The Castle, it’s the vibe of it — the unmistakeable sense of unease permeates the movie. An almost hypnotic disorientation is maintained throughout, with dystopian sets and off-centre camera angles, topped off by those repeated jarring musical interludes — straight out of the Stanley Kubrick playbook. This is an unease that has since been taken up by virtually every subsequently successful horror or thriller mutant variation of the Germpocalypse theme.
Let me take this full occult: if you look at that opening credit scene — with the red, rotating monkeys spiralling towards the void, that vaguely menacing accordion-ish backing music — you could almost argue we are having a spell cast over us.
Not so much The Plague Story then, but The Plague Spell… perhaps one of Hollywood’s greatest propaganda achievements.
Revelation of the Method and Hollywood Disclosure
There is one particular scene in 12 Monkeys that we are compelled to finish on — the aforementioned insane asylum scene between Brad and Bruce: probably the movie’s best, and perhaps one of the most important scenes in Germ Theory propaganda history.
While it is easily overshadowed (perhaps deliberately so) by Bruce’s subsequent arachnid-eating antics, Brad’s character seemingly ridicules the basic premise of Germ Theory: suggesting germs were invented in the 19th century as a marketing strategy (he says more, but that is the gist). When questioned on this premise — “You do believe in germs, don’t you?” — our boy Bruce brushes it away with a gruff and manly “I’m not crazy”: thus recruiting masculinity to the Germ Theory cause.
Pitt is the crazy one after all: which is why he must stay in the mad house, and why Bruce must escape and take up the germ-fighting crusade in the sane world beyond those walls.
But how crazy is the idea, really? How deep do you think the pernicious influence of crony capitalism goes in our Western society: that a group of rich assholes could possibly have come up with the whole thing in order to become even richer?
Here is a question for exploring this idea a bit further. Why do we see the paranoid conspiratorial rantings of Pitt’s character — a fully embodied, archetypal conspiracy theorist if there ever was one — as something worthy of the mental hospital… but not the arguably equally paranoid premise of the movie itself? As much as Pitt ticks all the boxes of the caricatured crazy person, what we also know by the end of the movie is that he is not stupid.
Indeed, what most occurred to me when I was re-watching 12 Monkeys (strictly for research purposes) was that we really do believe the conspiracies in movies — but only some of them. If we accept the Germpocalypse future of 12 Monkeys as possible, what else would we consider as feasible?
When the final reveal of the movie The Prestige was found to be secret underground cloning centres — a wink to one of the most seemingly ridiculous yet tantalisingly plausible conspiracy theories — do we acknowledge it as a potential reality as well?
When we engross ourselves in the original Indiana Jones trilogy, are we psychologically open to the possibility that the Nazi Party might have actually been a front for the collection of ancient artefacts to fuel their occult spiritual practices?
What about when you watch Hot Fuzz, and the shady group of 12 senior townspeople who keep a ruthless control over their population? Leaving aside the unnecessary but somehow appropriate bloody violence: is such a centralised power structure not a logical way to understand how a human population might come to be controlled by those who most seek power?
Here we come to another core conspiracy concept that will guide us on our journey Down the ‘Rona Hole: Revelation of the Method. The close cousin of Predictive Programming, there is a subtle difference between the two that distinguishes them as a tool for our Germ Theory elite.
Predictive Programming serves a tangible, real-world purpose: to psychologically prepare the population to accept coming agendas for social change. But these disclosures — if we were to view them as such, rather than simply entertaining plot devices — seem different. What practical reason would they have for leaking the existence of secret cloning centres, or occult Nazi archeology, or shadowy secret societies out into the public through our favourite movies… except as a way of telling us what is really going on behind the scenes?
Well, maybe that is exactly what they are doing. Maybe, for some obscure esoteric reason — perhaps to gain passive consent and acceptance from the public, perhaps to clear their own karma for what they have done or are about to do — they feel the need to reveal their secrets to us, but in a way that they will be revealed only to those with the sense to perceive it.
And so it might also be — maybe, hiding behind the supposed insanity of Brad Pitt’s character — that they revealed to us that Germ Theory has been a scam this entire time.
Germ Theory and Other Conspiracies
Hold on a sec. You can’t just “create” the concept of germs though, can you? The Germ Theory of Disease — the notion that human ailment can be linked back to distinct and specific micro-organisms — is not new, after all: it dates back to the theories of Louis Pasteur at the latest (a fascinating character in The Plague Story, who’s theories will be addressed in more detail in the next Act).
Let’s leave The Science for now. While germs have seemingly been with us since the birth of civilisation, this particular doomer re-branding is very much of our time. We no longer see the original Germ Theory before us, what we see is The Germ Conspiracy: a once plausible framework for understanding the the origins of disease, since transformed into a vortex for anxiety, fear and the unleashing of authoritarian tendencies.
So here’s a final inflection point: why have we normalised the paranoid reality of The Germ Conspiracy, but not that of, say, QAnon? You know: the conspiracy, universally denounced across mainstream and alternative media, suggesting a group of satanists have controlled the world for centuries, but who are currently being brought to justice behind the scenes by a team of White Hats lead by Orange Man?
Are they both not, when taken to their logical extremes, based on a similar idea: that there is something dark and evil — beyond the reach of our senses, yet ever-present in our lives — that is out to get us. And, interestingly: they both sell the idea that we are in need of saving by some other opposing external force, a force fighting for us not against us. What is the difference, at the end of the day, between the central mottos of each theory: to Trust the Experts, to Trust the Science… or Trust the Plan?
Spot the difference… if there is one
Is it also not fair to say that if you were going to summon, in some dimly illuminated boardroom of a luxurious Hollywood mansion, a conspiracy theory so dastardly brilliant that it would allow you to keep a population in a perpetual state of fear and disease, dependent on and controlled by a scientific elite… well, it is hard to think of a better one than The Germ Conspiracy.
Enjoy The Show
Now, to be clear: just because our current Germ-Theorised reality is proving an ideal reality in which to exert control over the general public, it does not mean that it was done intentionally. As much as it pains me to say, not everything is a conspiracy. Indeed, and as we will find out when we dive deep into the ‘Rona Science further into our journey: correlation does not always equal causation.
Nonetheless: a correlation is always worthy of further investigation and testing. And this is your challenge — our challenge — in our journey Down the ‘Rona Hole: can we conceptualise the Germ Theory of Disease as simply that — a conspiracy, born out of our now-obsessive conspiracy culture — and view it through that lens as we dig deeper?
Actually, as we finally close the curtain of Act 1 of the Coronaspiracy — an Act that has been fixated on the Silver Screen after all — let’s go one better. For the proper Q devotee, understanding our current reality is all about getting cozy with the popcorn — as we are obliged to see everything as a movie.
So, let’s all try it!
From hereon in, let’s look at the events surrounding The Coronaspiracy as the greatest Germ Theory Movie ever made: the final culmination, consummation, climax of The Germ Conspiracy; the necessary filling of the narrative void of The Plague Story that our Germ Theory-spruiking entertainers have left gaping in our minds and imagination.
Every story needs a climax, after all, which means there was no avoiding this moment; there will be no moving on from this story until it has been properly resolved. So let’s make sure we all get the closure that we need out of it, and enjoy the show along the way.
Plus, as an added bonus: seeing those involved in this movie as simply people playing their roles — actors playing their parts — also helps take the edge off, when you start to realise just bad some of these actors are.