Mother Jones illustration; Getty
In the lead-up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration, professional conspiracy peddlers are hard at work finding ways to gin up panic and paranoia—even if their preferred candidate is about to take office.
The fear mongering is ginning up skepticism about the next pandemic—and any vaccine that could fight it.
Some have suggested that the Deep State is already seeking to undermine Trump’s second presidency by plotting a civil war or scheming ways to prevent him from entering the White House. Those ideas, however, have been slightly too vague and lack the urgency of a good and salable conspiracy theory. So many players in the space have settled on something more specific: claiming that “a wave of deadly pandemics,” in the words of one, will strike the United States beginning on January 21.
As with any conspiracy theory that has a chance of taking root, the notion has the benefit of drawing from real life. Cases of avian flu are mounting; if it continues to spread, how Trump responds to that public health emergency could be a major part of his second presidency. And last week, a mysterious flu-like outbreak was identified after killing dozens of people in Congo, where it is circulating alongside a new strain of mpox that is also spreading elsewhere in eastern and southern Africa.
But the real focus of this latest round of Trump-tied conspiracy-peddling isn’t any genuine viral threat, but a gross distortion of the words of Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director for the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and a recognized expert in the field.
While appearing on MSNBC on December 4 to talk about infectious disease prevention under the upcoming Trump presidency, Hotez said “We have some big picture stuff coming down the pipe,” referring to avian flu, new strains of Covid, and other potential outbreaks. “All that’s going to come crashing down on January 21 on the Trump administration. We need a really really good team to be able to handle this.”
Hotez’s simple quote explaining how Donald Trump and his staff will have to face the prospect of infectious disease outbreaks when he becomes president was instead taken by people with a monetary interest in misunderstanding him as either as a dark prophecy or a threat to deliberately unleash disease.
Alex Jones, for one, immediately seized on the comments, saying on Infowars that Hotez’s statements were “an attempt to terrorize,” as well as to promote “forced shots, lockdowns, tyranny, further global collapse.”
“Do what we say politically or we’re going to release this,” Jones added. “That’s the message.”
The same sentiment was repeated by Mikki Willis, a filmmaker who produced Plandemic, the pseudoscientific, pseudo-documentary series that argued Covid-19 was deliberately created and unleashed as part of a tyrannical global plot. Willis shared a post about Hotez’s comments on Telegram, adding, “Apparently, all we need to do to avoid the next Plandemic is to stay home on Jan 21st. Cool.” Dozens of verified Twitter accounts, whose paid access to the site boosts their posts and replies, also shared videos of Hotez’s comments in ways that cast dark suspicion. Just one such post has been viewed three million times.
The spinning of his remarks led to an immediate wave of harassment targeting Hotez; the conspiratorial and anti-vaccine site Natural News ran an approving roundup collecting online comments bashing the doctor, including one suggesting he should be arrested and jailed so he can be forced to “explain how he knows this.”
Because this strain of conspiracy rests on the notion another pandemic is about to occur, it also created a useful and profitable news peg for people looking to sell bogus pandemic preventatives. The stories about Hotez on Infowars and Natural News are surrounded by ads for various supplements, private-label colloidal silver products, and in the case of Natural News, founder Mike Adams’ nine-hour audiobook on surviving what he calls the “global reset.”
Some of these wares are pricey: the video site Brighteon, which bills itself as a YouTube alternative and mainly hosts conspiratorial content, including Natural News’, is selling a “Next Pandemic Preparedness Survival” package, originally priced at $600. It features interviews with a variety of characters from the medical freedom, anti-vaccine and pseudomedical worlds, including several people who earned notoriety during the earlier days of the Covid pandemic. Among them are Stella Immanuel, the Houston doctor who not only falsely claimed that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for Covid, but that gynecological problems like endometriosis are due to having sex with demons; retired chiropractor Bryan Ardis, who advanced a complicated conspiracy theory about snake venom in vaccines; prominent anti-vaccine attorney Thomas Renz; and Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former biochemistry researcher who advanced misinformation about vaccines for years before appearing as the main character in Plandemic.
All of this fear mongering and scapegoating ultimately serves multiple purposes: ginning up skepticism about the next pandemic—whatever it may be, before it even appears—as well as preemptively creating hostility against any vaccine that might be developed to fight it in order to peddle fake cures.
But there’s more lurking beneath the surface. Hotez is Jewish; he wrote in a Twitter thread that he’s seeing a disturbing increase in the overlap of anti-science and antisemitic content, including flyers in which syringes are drawn in the shape of swastikas mailed repeatedly to his home. His thread also singled out a past claim by Robert Kennedy Jr., the prominent anti-vaccine activist who Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, suggesting Covid had been engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
“Our antivaccine friends appear energized for some reason,” Hotez wrote, sharing a screenshot of another threat. “Doesn’t take much to figure out why. I anticipate a rough few years ahead.”