10 Strangest Medical Conspiracy Theories

Over half of Americans believe in medical conspiracy theories. Some are only a little strange. Others are outright bizarre.

Seven years ago, I was working at a heath food store and heavily pregnant with my first child, when I was approached by a regular customer. I knew she was eccentric-- she had thirteen children and was looking for fertility-boosting herbs so she could have more-- but I didn't know just how eccentric she was until she urged me to avoid having my child tested for PKU in the hospital.

"When they draw the blood, they don't actually test for diseases," she informed me quietly, "The nurses actually steal the blood and sell it to witches to use in spells."

I wasn't sure at first if she was joking.

"Newborn baby blood is very valuable on the black market," she added.

Well, I consented to having my kids' blood drawn by those evil witches at the hospital, yet, to date, neither of them have fallen victim to a mysterious curse.

That conspiracy theory is pretty far out there, but it's not too different from the many bizarre conspiracy theories you can find just by poking around on the internet for a few minutes. Here are some of the others I've encountered.

1. The Government is Hiding the Cure for Cancer

This one is everywhere. Over a third of people believe it. It's launched tens of thousands of articles, hundreds of websites, and dozens of books-- and it's no truer now than it was a hundred years ago, when it first popped up. You'd think that the cancer-related deaths of people who believed this conspiracy, such as The Cure for All Cancers author Hulda Clark , might be a red flag for these conspiracy theorists, but the belief persists.

2. "They" Are Lying About Ebola

There were a few dozen variations of this conspiracy theory. One of the more popular claims was that ebola is a manufactured virus deliberately given to people for "population control" or other purposes. The claims echo similar legends in the 1980s about HIV. Another common rumor was that ebola doesn't exist at all, or that the government was hiding a cure until it spread to the industrialized world. An unintentionally hilarious conspiracy theory even speculated that The Simpsons were in on it.

"Is there something we are not being told? Is it by pure chance & coincidence that the Simpsons would do predictive programming? There has been numerous predictions from The Simpsons which revealed futuristic events which came to pass. What of the Ebola recurrence in 2014? Is it planned or is it just by natural means? Ebola was not in the 90's, but it happened long ago in the mid 70's... But The Simpsons reveal in late 90's Ebola virus... Interesting right?" 

3.  Products You Use Every Day Contain Dead Babies

If you go to pretty much any anti-vaccine website, you'll encounter this one. Some writers go so far as to claim that pregnancies are aborted for the sole purpose of using the fetuses to manufacture food, cosmetics, and medicine, even though no pregnancy has ever been aborted for such purpose and no approved foods or vaccines have ever contained fetal cells. This conspiracy theory was so prevalent that it actually led to a lawmaker pushing to ban fetuses in food. Glad our tax dollars are going to such good use.

4. You're Full of Worms

Conspiracy theorists love to blame medical problems on parasites that "they" are trying to hide. The cult of parents who treat autism with bleach enemas claim that rope worms-- chunks of intestine that come out when they fill their kids with bleach-- are behind autism, even though there is no such parasite. Assorted quacks on the internet, from Natural News to Organic Olivia to Modern Alternative Mama, give all sorts of advice amounting to, "You're full of parasites and they're causing all of your diseases." The idea can be traced to Hulda Clark... you know, the one mentioned above, who thought all cancer was caused by worms and then died of cancer.

5. The Government's Hiding a Scary Skin Disease

Delusional parsitosis-- the delusional belief that you are infested with parasites that aren't there-- is a condition that may be as old as humanity itself. Sure enough, it's the reason behind medical conspiracy #4. But its newest form, dubbed Morgellons disease, is a bit less known. Natural News and other conspiracy theorist websites claim that the condition, which involves feeling like you're covered in bugs, scratching yourself up, and getting little fibers from Band-Aids, blankets, and clothing in the scratches, say that it's a parasitic infection caused by GMOs and chemtrails, and that the CDC was involved in a cover-up to conclude that it was psychological.

6. Antidepressants Are Designed to Make You a Mass Murderer

One common medical conspiracy posits that SSRIs are a "gateway drug" designed to turn patients into violent monsters, either as part of a depopulation measure or to somehow churn more profits for Big Pharma. The evidence they give is that some murderers were taking antidepressants. You'd think that with all that money and research, Big Pharma would have done a better job coming up with pills to create killers. More than one in ten Americans takes an antidepressant, yet very few of us end up committing mass murder.

7. Mental Illness Doesn't Exist and They're Trying to Poison You

The sad reality behind this is that mentally ill people are by far the most likely people to fall for conspiracy theories and by far the most likely to be harmed by them.Take, for example, this conspiracy theorist, who says that bipolar disorder isn't real and that it was invented to push drugs on children. Or this one, who says the same thing about oppositional defiant disorder. Or the hundreds who have said it about ADHD. Or this guy, who says that he is the messiah and that his diagnosis of schizophrenia is part of a conspiracy to hide that. Need I say more?

8. Jews Are Killing and Experimenting On You

I touched on this a bit in Antisemitism in the Anti-Vaccine Movement, but the conspiracy theory runs much deeper and wider than the anti-vax movement itself. For example, conspiracy theorists often claim that routine infant circumcision is part of a Jewish conspiracy (strange, since Judaism doesn't command circumcising anyone besides Jews). They often blame specific Jewish families, like the Rothschilds and Goldman-Sachs, for all the world's ails. Failing that, they'll point to the State of Israel. One prominent medical conspiracy theorist blames pretty much every possible conspiracy on Jews, who he says worship Satan, poison dissenters with odorless gas, and control the medical industry through "biomedical terrorism."

9. The World is Being Depopulated

Supposedly, we are all being subjected to a "slow kill" to depopulate the Earth. This involves a number of intricate and intertwined conspiracies, from chemicals dumped out of airplanes to fluoride in our drinking water to birth control in our food. Some go so far as to claim that "they" are putting chemicals in our food to make people gay, thereby limiting birth rates. You'd think that all the world's leading scientists working together could do a better job: birth rates continue to climb worldwide, with no sign of a population crash any time soon.

10. Everyone's Getting a Tracking Device
This one started circulating decades ago, when microchips and GPS first came into existence. It picked up even more steam when the Affordable Care Act rolled out, leading many people to accuse President Obama of mandating microscopic tracking devices on all American citizens. This led to reignited fears of immunization, with many anti-vaxxers claiming that flu shots contain GPS trackers also used in war and even secret mind-control computers. Don't worry, though: other conspiracy theorists have plenty of suggestions for nullifying the effects of these tiny computers.

Start Here.

Anti-Semitism in the Anti-Vaccine Movement

Antisemitism is rampant in the anti-vaccine community, and it goes a long, long way back. In 1932, an antisemitic magazine published a drawing of a smug-looking Jewish doctor immunizing a baby in a cartoon labeled, "Die Impfung," or "The Vaccination," with a caption reading: "It seems to me that poison and Jews seldom do good things."

We haven't moved much further beyond the early premise that vaccines are poisons concocted by a Jewish conspiracy. It's not a surprise, really: Judaism is the Kevin Bacon of conspiracy theorist culture. You just have to scratch the surface of any conspiracy theory to the Jews who are allegedly behind it. Children missing? Jews stole them and drank their blood. Recession? Must have been the Rothschild family. Problems on Wall Street? Jews did it. Federal Reserve conspiracies? Definitely Jews. Media cover-ups? Jews. Subliminal messages in Hollywood? Jews. 9/11? Jews. Chemtrails? Jews. Vaccines? Jews, of course.

I've encountered it time and time again in my passion for vaccine advocacy. People who might otherwise take me seriously latch on to mentions of my cultural background as evidence that I'm being paid by Big Pharma. After I'd seen a post that said that fellow vaccine advocate Dorit Reiss and I were "buddies," I sent her a message for the first time, introducing myself. I mentioned in passing that her maiden name, Rubinstein, is similar to my stepfather's name, Rubenstein, and said we could be distant relatives. Of course, I couldn't help but quip that we were both part of the Jewish shadow government.

It was literally one day later that I received a message from someone telling me that "Everyone knows your Aunt Dorit is feeding you money to peddle her lies." The day after I encountered fellow Jewish vaccine advocate, she was suddenly my wealthy aunt who was funding my advocacy for vaccines.

This is just the painless surface of antisemitism in the anti-vaccine movement. I've seen how ugly-- and how ridiculous-- it gets. Anti-vaccine activists have told me, you see, that it's my fault that my daughter has autism, because my "Jewish genes" from my "tribe" are full of "mental, physical, etc disabilities due to the years/centuries of inbreeding." (Joke's on them, anyway, since autism rates in Israel are half that of the U.S., and my daughter is culturally but not ethnically Jewish.)

They say that our children get special vaccines. One man, based on kids he's seen staring at him in Walmart, as arrived at the brilliant conclusion that Jews get special vaccines and that all other children get poisonous vaccines. 

If this were true, I'm a little upset that I missed the part of Hebrew school where I was supposed to learn the secret handshake to let my pediatrician know that I'm Jewish and that my kids should get the vaccines that don't cause them to stare when an antisemitic stranger is creeping on them in Walmart.

It's all part of a Zionist conspiracy, though-- so they say. These people envision a future dominated by  militant Jews with Magen Davids and the words "Zionist" written on their uniforms. This Jew-dominated future police state apparently involves vaccine checkpoints where mothers scream and are restrained as their babies are helplessly injected with lethal chemicals. 

And this panic over some future Zionist police state seems to bleed into every single discussion they have with Jewish vaccine activists. They tell us that we are just part of a plot.

...Something to do with the "Judaification of America." And they want us to go back to Russia and East Europe. You know, those places were we were slaughtered by the millions.

But they also want us to go back to Israel. They can't seem to make up their minds.

They call us "cockroach."

They call us communist, and in the same breath, call us fascist. They insult our appearance. They call us "mindless, money-driven, greedy heathens."

My, isn't that familiar.

The scary thing is that, the closer and closer anti-vaccine activists get to utter Nazism, the more they begin to claim that they themselves are victims of a modern Holocaust. They flippantly dismiss the actual horrors of the Holocaust-- the brutal deaths of 6 million innocent people by gas, disease, starvation, and labor-- by comparing their experience of refusing to immunize their kids to the experience of being a Jew in Nazi Germany.

"Their doing the same thing to us that they are they jews," one anti-vaxxer screamed, taking the time to edit her comment to eliminate one of her seventeen grammatical errors.

Meanwhile, one of the most popular articles cries, "First, They Came for The Anti-Vaxxers," a reference to a poignant poem about the Holocaust by Martin Niemoller. It implies that the anti-vaxxers are the "Jews" of today, the first victims in what will become a total Holocaust.

Although it was popular, it wasn't the first or only vaccine/Holocaust comparison to go viral. Amy Barajas, an insufferable schmuck of a mommy-blogger, posted an image of herself in Holocaust Chic, wearing a self-imposed anti-vaccine badge and comparing it to the badges my people wore to the gas chambers. The image spread like wildfire among anti-vaxxers with persecution complexes.

Another anti-vaccine activist compared his resistance to vaccines to August Landmesser's refusal to give a Nazi salute. August Landmesser was tortured for years in concentration camps because of his resistance to the Nazi party and his relationship with his Jewish wife. Anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, have yet to even be denied access to public health insurance and public school. Don't worry, though: he "don't mean to be insulting."

The anti-vaxxers know how much it stings when I, as a Jew, am told that they are victims of a modern Holocaust. They exploit this when speaking to me and my fellow Jewish vaccine advocates:

Anti-vaxxers aren't always hateful people. I know that because I used to be one of them. But I come from a culture that values reason. I was taught as a child that the highest mitzvah, or commandment, is to nurture human life-- that it goes above and beyond any other duty we have to ourselves and others. My background plays a role in my vaccine advocacy not because it's part of a global conspiracy, but because it's a culture that prizes science and human life.

 All joking and stereotypes aside, it's not a coincidence that a disproportionate number of Jews are drawn to careers in medicine. It's not (despite what some may say) because it's a well-paid career, but rather, because we tend to value science and its role in improving and strengthening the bodies that we're given. We are commanded not to accept human life as short and brutal, but to use our minds, and the minds of those who came before us, to build a better future.

I'm not a "good" Jew. I've got tattoos on both of my forearms, I'm queer as a ten-cent nickel, and my son's still got his foreskin. I have a Christmas tree and I get my daughter a real birthday cake every year even though her birthday tends to fall during Passover. Plus, I can't stand Benjamin Netanyahu or gefilte fish. But I know I'm at least doing one thing right. I'm standing up for the use of science to prolong and protect the lives of my children and others. 

Apparently, all other things aside, my vaccine advocacy combined with my Judaism mean that I am an ugly communist fascist money-grubbing Zionist cockroach shill. My reasons for advocating for vaccines are called into question, my children are labeled the defective products of incest, and my opinion is taken with a grain of antisemitic salt. 

The anti-vaxxers are right when they say that today sometimes looks suspiciously like 1932. But I think they're wrong about who among us is actually the target of hate.