The COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a novel coronavirus, first isolated in January 2020. But a viral video has been spreading a conspiracy theory that the pandemic has actually been a plot to poison people with snake venom.
A video that draws on several major COVID-19 conspiracy theories — and introduces a new plot to tie them together — has garnered millions of views on Rumble, a social media platform popular among conservatives.
The video, which is billed as a “documentary,” consists of a single, roughly hour-long interview with Bryan Ardis, a retired chiropractor who sells purported acne cures online and, now, is selling a line of supplements called “Anti-V” — perhaps a reference to antivenom, although the website doesn’t explain. We’ve written about him before.
The video is peppered with screenshots of scientific papers and news articles that Ardis cites to lend credence to his false claims. But none of them actually provides any evidence to support his conspiracy theory.
Ardis, for example, recites some of the claims that he’s made before about remdesivir, falsely claiming that it’s a “toxic, deadly drug” being used to purposely poison people. As if to prove this point, the video misleadingly shows a table from a paper in which 53% of patients treated with remdesivir died. But that comes from a trial of patients with Ebola virus disease and does not show that those patients died because of the drug.
In fact, contrary to his claim that...
A popular social media conspiracy theory about a recent cluster of hantavirus cases claims that the word “hanta” means “scam,” “fraud,” or “nonsense” in “Hebrew slang.” That’s more or less where t...