To hear Donald Trump tell it, his first administration was on a roll and doing well until the 2020 pandemic hit the country and shut down the global economy. Now conspiracy theorists think that President Joe Biden will try to sabotage a new incoming administration by starting another plague or even a civil war.
Mother Jones reported Friday that the right fears the spread of avian flu will take hold in the U.S. and that Trump will be forced to put aside his agenda to deal with it. In addition to avian flu, "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 pox that is also spreading elsewhere in eastern and southern Africa," the report said.
The details of how this will lead to a pandemic are a bit muddled, according to the report, which says the ideas are "slightly too vague" and lack "the urgency of a good and salable conspiracy theory."
ALSO READ: The one belief that predicted Trump voters with scary accuracy
It hinges on comments from Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital.
When he spoke to MSNBC on Dec. 4, he commented, “We have some big picture stuff coming down the pipe." He was talking about the avian flu and new strains of COVID.
"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," said Hotez.
He was talking about Trump's incoming administration being forced to face large-scale problems, and then saying they may not be prepared for it.
Alex Jones, a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, called the comments “an attempt to terrorize" the American public as well as to promote “forced shots, lockdowns, tyranny, further global collapse.”
One post sharing Hotez's comments has been viewed three million times, the report said.
Critics swarmed, launching fresh attacks on Hotez, who faced harassment during the COVID pandemic. The anti-vaccine website Natural News showed a roundup of attacks on Hotez, citing one person saying he should be arrested and jailed so he can be forced to “explain how he knows this.”
Hotez reviewed the threats the global health community already faces. His comments did not contain new information.
Another pandemic, however, gives conspiracy theorists another opportunity to sell their snake oil, the report said.
"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," the report closed.
