Why are so many people drawn to conspiracies in times of crisis? Or has it become a game plan to Secure Your Gurudom By Spreading Conspiracies ? 

• Why does the world love Godmen?
• Looking for easy solutions to the intricacies of life, people are lured by the tricks used by crafty Godmen and God women.
• They claim to tell the true meaning and purpose of life.
• What pulls the followers of these dealers of faith? Why the distressed call for to believe that a man has a fast route to God and happiness?
• It is just like a peg of wine that diverts their strength. People are a victim of their weaknesses. People with firm faith in their inner self, values and actions do not need to transfer their self to another especially not to crafty Godmen and God Women.
• However, human beings have a deep innate desire to connect with someone or something. They also want to show their worth. All want to have a meaning and purpose of life. They crave to have a unique self and to prove their existence.
• It is this anxious inner urge that is exploited by the conspiracy theorists to boost their Divine Gurudom.
• The COVID19 pandemic has given rise to many such Zoom Based Conspiracy Theorists aka crafty Godmen and God women who preach anti vaxx theories and tons of unscientific nonsense.
• Little do these jokers know that they are putting lives at risk by putting forth their inhumane vaccine hesitancy / vaccine resistance trash. Lives of even the sole bread earners of millions of families.

• As the Covid vaccine supply increases throughout the U.S., the next hurdle to reaching herd immunity will be convincing those who are hesitant about vaccines to receive their shots
• World Health Organization listed ‘vaccine hesitancy’ among the top ten threats to global health this year. It defined vaccine hesitancy as “reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines”.
• As per the WHO, vaccination prevents two-three million deaths each year and this figure will increase by another 1.5 million if the vaccine coverage improves.
• Yet, a survey of over 1,40,000 people from 140 countries revealed the striking difference in how people trusted vaccines.
• At 95%, people from South Asia trusted vaccines the most followed by Eastern Africa at 92%, while Western Europe and Eastern Europe brought the rear with just 59% and 52%, respectively.
• The repercussions of vaccine hesitance is now playing out globally with nearly 4,24,000 children with confirmed measles as on October 10, 2019 as against 1,73,000 in the whole of 2018.

Shoot for the middle

• Pick your battles. Some people are dead-set against receiving any vaccines and unlikely to change their minds. But there are also plenty of people in the middle, the so-called “vaccine hesitant,” who may just want more information or be waiting until more people they know are vaccinated before they step up.
• Kaiser Family Foundation surveys show 22% of people they polled recently are in this “wait and see” category (55% have already received the vaccine or will get it as soon as they can, 15% say they definitely won’t take it, and 7% say they’ll only take it if required). It’s this “wait and see” group that’s most worth focusing your efforts on.
• There are some people that aren’t going to change their minds no matter what, so focus more on the so-called movable middle.
• Even the UNICEF has started the Vaccine Confidence Project.
• You might think of it as your swing vote — any political strategist will tell you that getting as much of the swing vote as you can is what’s important. It can also make people more resilient to the predatory behavior of anti-vax groups.

Importance of Covid-19 Vaccines and why you should not miss it

• Vaccinations against Covid-19 were developed using science that has been in the books for ages. These vaccines are not experimental. They have been through all the stages of development for any new scientific breakthrough. In addition, Covid-19 specific vaccinations are constantly monitored by multiple health organizations purely because of all the pandemonium this virus has caused across the world. Hence, it becomes crucial for every citizen to take part in the vaccination drives organized by their local governmental bodies and other bodies offering the vaccine officially. Here’s a list of important details about vaccinations that make it absolutely necessary for you to NOT miss vaccination against Covid-19.

Covid-19 Vaccines are effective -

• Covid-19 vaccines have been tested by multiple drug administration authorities in the world. They are proven to be effective in reducing your probability of contracting COVID-19.

You are contributing to mass wellness by getting vaccinated -

• Once you are vaccinated, your body is much better prepared to shield off more viruses by making your immune system stronger. At the same time, when you are protecting yourself, you are also protecting those around you.

A safe way to build your immune system:

• Vaccinations are known to boost your immune system by teaching your body how to fight threats. Therefore many consider vaccinations as a way to build up your immune system and the manner in which your body reacts to foreign bodies.

No Covid Vaccines can infect you with Covid:

• Many believe falsely that since the vaccine includes a strand of the virus, you may actually get infected by it. That is not how a virus affects a body and hence you are in no danger by being infected with the disease of the vaccine.

Covid Vaccines are certified by multiple bodies

• The Covid Vaccinations that are available by societies, governments and other people-body, are all certified by multiple certification authorities that have very stringent measures of success. If a vaccine is certified, you can be certain it has been tested through proven methods. There are no reasons for any individual to avoid a Covid-19 vaccination and it is our responsibility at Pathkind labs to dismiss any fears anyone has of the vaccination. There are no reasons to avoid a covid-19 vaccine and many reasons to not miss it. Pathkind labs are certified at testing for Covid-19 as well as various other infections, diseases and viruses. Our team of experts have built insight through years of experience and are your number one choice when it comes to health tests and analyses.

The anti-vaccination infodemic on social media: A behavioral analysis

• Vaccinations are without doubt one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, and there is hope that they can constitute a solution to halt the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
• However, the anti-vaccination movement is currently on the rise, spreading online misinformation about vaccine safety and causing a worrying reduction in vaccination rates worldwide.
• In this historical time, it is imperative to understand the reasons of vaccine hesitancy, and to find effective strategies to dismantle the rhetoric of anti-vaccination supporters.
• For this reason, experts analyzed the behavior of anti-vaccination supporters on the platform Twitter. Here we identify that anti-vaccination supporters, in comparison with pro-vaccination supporters, share conspiracy theories and make use of emotional language.
• Researchers demonstrated that anti-vaccination supporters are more engaged in discussions on Twitter and share their contents from a pull of strong influencers. The movement’s success relies on a strong sense of community, based on the contents produced by a small fraction of profiles, with the community at large serving as a sounding board for anti-vaccination discourse to circulate online.
• Based on these results, researchers welcomed policies that aim at halting the circulation of false information about vaccines by targeting the anti-vaccination community.
• Based on their data, they also proposed solutions to improve the communication strategy of health organizations and build a community of engaged influencers that support the dissemination of scientific insights, including issues related to vaccines and their safety.

How the Anti-Vaxxers Got Red-Pilled

• What happens when a global pandemic, a vaccine-resistance movement, and the age of conspiracy collide? A black hole of misinformation that poses a grave threat to public health.

• Steven Brandenburg, a Milwaukee-area pharmacist, attempted to destroy more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine, because, he admitted, he feared the Moderna drug would “alter the recipient’s DNA.”

• Described in law-enforcement documents as a “conspiracy theorist,” Brandenburg, 46, had reportedly warned his wife that “the world is crashing down around us” and that “the government is planning cyberattacks and plans to shut down the power grid,” according to divorce-court documents.

• If you’re surprised that a scientifically educated medical professional, trusted with dispensing lifesaving medicine, could suffer a rebellion against reason and give himself over to discredited conspiracy theories, you haven’t been paying attention.

• In the world of the 2020s, respectable men and women surrender to this kind of unreal thinking every day. (Brandenburg pleaded guilty to federal tampering charges in January; his lawyer would not discuss Brandenburg’s conspiratorial beliefs.)

• The phenomenon is known as “red-pilling” — a reference to a scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves’ character chooses to take a red pill and discover the hidden truths of the world — and it affects those whose once-rational skepticism swallows them whole, pulling them into a networked community of like-minded conspiracy theorists.

• While the public record does not indicate Brandenburg traveled this far, many find a home in the big-tent conspiracy of anti vaxx groups, whose members increasingly see vaccination as part of a diabolical plot by the “deep state” to enslave humanity.

• Exploring conspiracy theories and mass delusion can inadvertently popularize misinformation. So inoculate yourself with facts: The novel vaccines produced by our great scientists are revolutionary and take advantage of our own cellular machinery to safeguard recipients against future coronavirus infection.

• If you’ve seen computer renderings of the coronavirus, you know its surface is covered by spike proteins that create the “crown” that gives coronaviruses their name. Humans get infected with Covid-19 when these spike proteins pierce healthy cells, allowing the virus to invade, infect, and begin replicating.

• Traditional vaccines have relied on exposing people to an inactivated (killed) or attenuated (weakened) virus. As the immune system reacts to a non-threatening inoculation, it gains the ability to fight off infection from the real pathogen. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines don’t include any virus at all. Instead, they use genetic code — messenger RNA or mRNA — to activate a few of our own cells to become spike-protein factories. The vaccine consists of tiny strands of mRNA encased in fat — a lipid particle — that allows them to slip inside a cell without being attacked. Once inside, the mRNA functions roughly like computer code, instructing cells to begin assembling coronavirus spike proteins out of amino-acid building blocks already in our bodies.

• The presence of these strange proteins triggers our immune systems to create antibodies to neutralize them. Our immune system also summons T-cells to attack and shut down cells that were coded to produce spike proteins. Together, these immune responses prepare the body to fight off a real potential coronavirus infection. It’s very elegant. It’s also de-risked it a lot. There’s no physical way to get Covid from this thing. As for the conspiracy theory that an mRNA vaccine alters your own genes? “It literally doesn’t,”  “It doesn’t become part of your DNA.”

• Taming the pandemic will require both individual immunity — as produced by the vaccines — and community-level “herd immunity” created when a critical mass of individuals are resistant to infection. Herd immunity is like a firewall in public health; a localized flare-up of infection among a few individuals will be unable to spread broadly, instead burning itself out.

• So far, the drugs appear to be living up to their billed efficacy of 95 percent protection from infection. And apart from some rare (and treatable) allergic reactions, the side effects seem well tolerated. But vaccine avoidance is already emerging as a troubling trend, particularly among health care and nursing-home workers on the front lines of the pandemic. Through mid-January, the CDC reported that only 32 percent of eligible nursing-home workers nationwide had chosen to get vaccinated.

Anti Vaxx Culture

• Contemporary anti-vax culture took root in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a startling rise in autism was hypothesized to be connected to childhood vaccinations. Robust science has since debunked any relationship between vaccination and autism. But at the time, the specter of vaccine injury sparked real concern among reasonable people.
• In 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published an article purporting to link the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine to “developmental regression in a group of previously normal children.” In the U.S. a year later, a federal review of mercury in drugs highlighted that a mercury-based preservative in childhood vaccines could expose infants, over the first six months of life, to a potentially harmful quantity of the neurotoxic metal. Out of an abundance of caution, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be phased out of vaccines. In 2005, Rolling Salon co-published a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. piece, “Deadly Immunity,” that helped push the provocative hypothesis that thimerosal triggered autism into wider circulation. The piece drew swift criticism and required significant corrections, including to a key statistic about childhood mercury exposure.
• By the turn of the decade, both hypotheses had collapsed under the weight of scientific evidence. In 2009, a paper in Clinical Infectious Diseases cited “20 epidemiologic studies” to conclude that “neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism.” The Lancet retracted its MMR paper in 2010, with the journal’s editor saying he felt he’d been deceived, while calling the paper “utterly false.” In 2011, Salon retracted the Kennedy piece, writing, “The best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.” The story no longer appears on internet.
• Fear of vaccination, however, didn’t disappear because scientists said it should. Instead, anti-vax beliefs spread widely, popularized by celebrities like actress Jenny McCarthy.
• Today’s anti-vax movement has grown increasingly cozy with theories about dark agendas, ruthless profit motives, and powerful enemies, reserving peculiar animus for billionaire Bill Gates, whose foundation promotes vaccination globally. For his part, Kennedy continues to promote unfounded links between vaccines and autism, even though thimerosal has been phased out of childhood vaccines: “They replaced it with aluminum,” he says, “which is almost as bad.” (Aluminum salts have been safely used in vaccines for more than seven decades, according to the CDC.) “People like me get vilified and ridiculed,” he says, “but I will debate anybody about this.”

A Deep Dive Into Conspiracy Theorist Mind

• A paradox of conspiracy theories is that they’re not full flights of fancy. They involve imagined and invented connections between real people, phenomena, and events.
• There’s a structure to the irrational belief. “Conspiracy theories are not the product of a disordered mind; they’re the product of an overly ordered mind.
• Conspiracy theories happen when you have an enormous need for order in a disordered universe.
• Having a genuine villain out there is really important for conspiracies to root themselves sufficiently in reality so that we continue to pay attention to them.
• This search for order has taken millions of humans to a dark place.
• Spiritualists disguise their nihilistic worldview. The spirituality preachers belief system is a crossover between a conspiracy theory and a religious cult, and its ideology takes strands of many past conspiracies and weaves them into a big tent where priors are welcome and almost any theory can find safe harbor.

• The core of so called spiritual gurus is familiar. It posits that the surface world of respectable politicians, well-intentioned government institutions, and a media seeking to hold them accountable, is an illusion. The real power in the world is wielded by shadowy power brokers in the government, Hollywood, and the media called “the cabal” or the “deep state.

• It takes this conspiratorial boilerplate to wild extremes. The “deep state” is alleged to be insatiable in its thirst for power, and willing to do anything — from launching wars to spreading pestilence — to move closer to global domination. Their ideology has no room for subtlety. The conspirators are believed to be the embodiment of evil, actual “luciferians” and pedophiles.

• The theory may sound lunatic, but they are no longer relegated to the fringe:  Tenets of the spiritual gurus belief system are even more widely held: Because they want people to believe that a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our life, so that they can maintain their gurudom.

• In the Gurudom mythology, the heroes fighting to expose the deep state include an alleged intelligence officer, known as Divine God, for the “Power-level” clearance he or she is alleged to hold.

• The conspiracy has elements of a massive role-playing game. For years, the anonymous “Gurudom” dropped cryptic hints or “crumbs” on message boards, which Gurudom adherents then sought to “bake” into coherent narratives about coming events. 

• Anti-vaxxers are people who often identify as leaning politically left. They often come to this stance because they’re anti–corporate, and they’re really concerned about Big Pharma making money.
• Research has shown that openness to conspiracy theory is correlated to intuitive thinking over evidence-based thinking.
• Conspiratorial beliefs take hold in people who make gut-level decisions and place disproportionate weight on symbolic costs.
• People who believe in conspiracy theories also believe that GMOs are bad. They tend to like organic food or natural health remedies.

The Mind Of A Conspiracy Theorist

• By now, scientists have roundly debunked the theory that the coronavirus is spread by 5G mobile signals. But that hasn’t stopped people from believing it—and many of these believers have made the leap from that premise to the theory that a powerful villain unleashed the virus to control the population. (Billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Bill Gates are on the shortlist, although conspiracy theorists aren’t ruling out the Clintons.) When the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum in the midst of the pandemic, another wave of believers embraced conspiracy theories linking the two phenomena, including the rumor that Soros had instigated the protests as the next step in his path to world domination.
• Both Covid-19 and systemic racism pose real life-or-death dangers. So why are so many people becoming preoccupied instead with threats that have no grounding in reality? It’s partly because of the magnitude of the real threats, psychologists say. Studies show that conspiracy theories tend to snowball during times of crisis, when fear is rampant and clear explanations are in short supply. They appeal in part because they offer a straightforward narrative and someone to blame. But researchers are starting to pay more attention to these theories, and the motives and mechanisms that drive them, as it becomes clear that they aren’t a harmless method for coping with the unknown. They can have truly damaging consequences in the real world.
• At the core of every conspiracy theory is the idea that a powerful person, or group of people, is secretly hatching a dastardly scheme. Almost anything that makes headlines can spawn these theories, especially when there’s room for confusion about what really happened.
• The coronavirus pandemic is a particularly fertile breeding ground for such thinking. It’s terrifying, not well understood, and happening on a massive scale. And in the face of pandemic-level panic, our minds have a tendency to seek explanations that match the intensity of our feelings. To say that the whole world has come to a halt because a teeny-weeny virus jumped from a bat to another animal and then to a guy in a Chinese market seems too insignificant an explanation. But a conspiracy theory that has thousands of people in cahoots? That seems more proportional.
• Past health crises, from the AIDS epidemic to the Zika outbreak, gave rise to theories eerily similar to those circulating today about coronavirus. At times like these, conspiracy theories are more appealing than the truth because they offer the possibility of control, Imhoff says. We can thwart an evil plan, at least hypothetically. But we can’t thwart the unseen forces of nature.
• Conspiracy theories make a very tempting promise: Just stop the villain and you get your life back. That’s what we all want. It’s a charming narrative that’s very easy to buy into: Just stop Bill Gates from polluting the airwaves with 5G and we can go out again and our kids can go back to school.

• It’s no surprise that so many people are currently in thrall to this narrative. But studies show that some people are especially prone to these beliefs, even without the motivating uncertainty of a global health crisis. Researchers have found that this “conspiracy mentality” correlates with particular personality traits, including low levels of trust and an increased need for closure, along with feelings of powerlessness, low self-esteem, paranoid thinking, and a need to feel unique.

• It’s a worldview that believes nothing happens without a reason and that there are sinister forces at work behind the curtain. It’s a fairly stable worldview, so it doesn’t really matter what happens—that will be their interpretation.

• Still, roughly half of the world population believes in at least one political or medical conspiracy theory, so it’s hard to define these beliefs as abnormal. One thing to emphasize is that we all have needs for closure, uniqueness, and the like. It’s more a matter of some of these needs or biases being stronger among those who believe in conspiracy theories.

• Conspiracy thinking can also be attributed to external forces, including racial and social inequity, that erode our trust in authority figures, Pierre argues. When people lose their faith in official accounts, their search for answers often takes them “down the rabbit hole. Most ‘conspiracy theorists’ aren’t theorizing so much as they’re looking for answers and finding ones that resonate with the mistrust that got them searching in the first place.

Real Dangers

• On its own, belief in conspiracies isn’t inherently dangerous or wrong, psychologists say. After all, sometimes powerful people really are hatching secret schemes. If Edward Snowden hadn’t suspected that top U.S. intelligence officials were engaged in a massive wiretapping conspiracy, for example, he couldn’t have exposed the NSA’s very real covert surveillance program.
• Skepticism toward people in power is part of a healthy democracy. It enables the checks and balances that prevent abuses and ultimately protect the public. But people with a conspiracy mindset distrust nearly everyone—especially experts. And that becomes problematic when it leads to an erosion of credibility that puts scientists on the same level as someone who just posted a video on YouTube.
• If I trust the scientist and you trust the guy on YouTube, there’s no common ground between us. And having a shared understanding of reality is essential to society. Without it, there is no truth anymore. That’s a huge danger.
• Even more troubling, conspiracy thinking is correlated with a tendency toward violent thoughts and fantasies, and to some degree with real violence. Researchers found that people who were generally inclined to believe in conspiracy theories were twice as likely as nonbelievers to agree that violence was an acceptable form of political protest.
• Conspiracy-motivated terrorists like are rare, but less egregious examples abound, especially among the new wave of coronavirus-related conspiracy believers. There are the dozens of 5G cell towers that have been vandalized in the U.K. because of the theory that 5G tech is being used to spread the virus—and the rising number of hate crimes against Asian-Americans.
• As the connections between conspiracy theories and real-world harm become evident, researchers are focusing more on beliefs they might have once shrugged off as a bit of innocuous eccentricity on the social fringes. We can’t assume anymore that they’re trivial, harmless little things. Some of them are reasonably popular—the belief that climate change is a hoax or that vaccines are dangerous, for example. These beliefs have real consequences. You can’t just dismiss them.
• Increased belief in vaccine-related conspiracy theories—including that the vaccines cause autism or are being used to implant microchips—has already led to a resurgence of measles and other preventable illnesses in some areas. And coronavirus-related theories could have even more devastating public health effects. Assuming that a successful coronavirus vaccine becomes available, a study found that 20 percent of people said they would refuse the vaccine and 31 percent weren’t sure if they would get it—which could keep the world from achieving herd immunity and put vulnerable people at risk.
• Believers of the many competing theories about the coronavirus have one thing in common: an unwillingness to follow the guidance of public health officials. People who bought into these theories were less likely to engage in social distancing or to support public health policies aimed at limiting contagion, regardless of whether they believed the virus was a hoax or a lab-grown bioweapon.
• And there’s a good chance that some people who believe the virus is a hoax also believe it’s a bioweapon. One of the quirks of conspiracy belief is that people are able to embrace multiple theories simultaneously—even when those theories contradict each other.
• In a study published in 2012, it was found that people who believed one conspiracy theory were more likely to believe another, even if it was logically impossible for both to be true. For example, the more someone believed the theory that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed she’d been murdered by British secret agents.
• How is this possible? Study concluded that people who are prone to conspiracy thinking are so quick to see a cover-up that they’re willing to let the logical niceties slide. The core underlying idea of most conspiracy theories is that the official line is not to be trusted. The details might not even matter that much. You’re prepared to at least entertain the two ideas at the same time, even if they’re not consistent with each other, because they are consistent with the idea that you need to be on your guard against the official explanation. You just know something is up.
• The problem for believers is that embracing these theories is an ineffective way to deal with our anxieties. They offer a sense of certainty, but they also make us believe that malevolent forces are out to get us, which in most cases is scarier than the truth.
• That can make you feel even worse—more out of control, more uncertain. It becomes a bit of a cycle.

Putting Out the Fire

• How can we stop conspiracy theories from spreading? It’s a critical question, especially now, researchers say—and there’s no easy answer. After all, conspiracy theories have always existed, and no amount of counter evidence has been able to change the minds of people who still think the moon landing was fake or that JFK's assassination was the work of a “deep state” conspiracy.
• The difference is that the stakes have never been higher when it comes to believing misinformation. The consequence of believing the earth is flat or the moon landing was staged is basically nothing—no one’s harmed by that. But in a pandemic, you could potentially have deaths on a massive scale if people believed the pandemic was a hoax.
• And conspiracy theories seem to be spreading faster than ever, partly because of the way they are magnified by social media.
• But social media isn’t solely responsible for the spread of these theories. We can’t even say for certain whether conspiracy theories are any more prevalent or influential now than in the past—just look at the witch trials of the 17th century and the Illuminati panics of the early 19th century. The fact that social media can carry theories like these farther, wider, and faster doesn’t mean that a greater proportion of people will ultimately believe them.
• When we poll about the moon landing conspiracy, we find only about 5 percent of people buy into it. Given how many people have heard of it, which is almost 100 percent, you’d think that number would be higher. Why isn’t it? Because people have filters. They don’t believe everything they read.
• On the other hand, banning individuals who post these theories could give their claims more credence among those who are predisposed to believe conspiracy theories.
• People who are prone to believe conspiracy theories might take this as evidence that Jones is onto something and got censored because the government didn’t want people to hear it. There is some data showing that these steps can backfire.” and other researchers say the most successful efforts to fight conspiracy theories give people the tools they need to question false claims for themselves.
• We should make people more science-literate and more media-literate, and these things can be taught early on. There is some evidence that courses in critical thinking actually work in making people less susceptible.
• Right now, people are just trying to make sense of a frightening, confusing time. The more facts they’re equipped with, the less powerless they’ll feel—and the harder it will be for conspiracy theories to take hold, especially when it comes to the coronavirus. The more we learn about this virus, the fewer gaps people have to fill with conspiracy theories. If there is so much information that contradicts their false notions, at some point people who aren’t diehard conspiracy theorists will have to update their beliefs. They’re not deluded—they just want to understand and have certainty.