Everyone put on your tin-foil hats. I’ve heard my share of healthcare-related conspiracy theories, but this one takes the cake. An Austrian journalist has filed charges against the World Health Organization (WHO) and key figures in the U.S. government for conspiracy to commit mass murder against virtually the entire population of the United States. She alleges that the current H1N1 pandemic is in fact a smoke and mirrors play. The virus, she claims, is a bio-engineered weapon that was deliberately released as a pretext to institute a mass vaccination programme in the United States. Rather than helping however, the forced vaccinations are designed to kill almost all of the population in the US, giving the surviving elite exclusive access to the vast natural resources of the country.

There’s really no need to go into the details of her story on how H1N1 was created, tested and deliberately released. The dumbest thing about the claim is the assertion that it is the natural resources of the country, rather than intellectual and creative powers of the U.S. population, from which the country’s wealth is derived. A cabal of Illuminati would be stupid indeed to kill off every else and be forced to subsist as hunter gatherers in the post-apocalyptic U.S. that would result.

There are whackos everywhere but what worries most at the moment are the anti-science, natural health nutjobs. I mean, the religious fundamentalists are pretty scary too, but they’re clearly on the fringe of society. But when you have someone like Oprah Winfrey making arguments on behalf of the anti-science crowd, they look more and more like the mainstream while the actual doctors and scientists are made out to look like bogeymen. Seriously, she’s telling millions of women that taking megadoses of hormones, and even injecting them directly into the vagina, is a valid anti-aging treatment and that thyroid problems are caused by women holding back what they have to say.

I’m not sure what can be done against this wave of anti-intellectualism and calling for more science education seems a bit trite, but this certainly reinforces my view that we shouldn’t allow science to be regarded as just another aspect of the truth, instead of being what it really is, the objective picture of reality as we currently know it.