The Politics Of Sars-Cov-2 (Covid-19) Pandemic And Conspiracy Theories: The Implications For Travesty Of Scientific Logic

Abstract

The twilight of year 2019 witnessed one of the unprecedented turn of events in human history. This followed the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) in Wuhan China that quickly spread like wildfire to other parts of the world. The consequent global anxiety about the nature and fatality of the virus degenerated into conspiracy theories. These theories centered emphases on the palpable cause of the virus, and thus politicized certain suspicions pertaining to the likely reasons for the outbreak and spread of the virus. The premise of the debate challenges scientific roots for discovery and explanation of inexplicable problems occasionally found in human environment. It seriously casts aspersions upon the laxity of science to prove the inapplicability of conjectures in answering scientific questions and thereby presented dissonance problem in a body of knowledge, surrounded by disjunctive cause-effect impasse. For the foregoing reasons, this study interrogates the impacts of unscientific speculations in contradicting scientific investigations and conclusion. It is both exploratory and descriptive research and dwells on secondary data and content analysis. It adopts propaganda model in explaining the variants of conspiracy that characterized the outbreak of Covid-19. The findings show that conspiracy theories distracted attention from fighting the virus and concentrated energies on politicization of its origin, purpose and the intended targets. It recommends restraint in politicizing global health challenges to limit the avoidable fatalities.