A Two-Headed Dragon: COVID and COVID Conspiracies

The Omicron variant is spreading across the world and world leaders beg the global population with access to vaccines and boosters to make the best choice for themselves and collective safety. When the stakes are this high, it doesn’t help that conspiracies about COVID and the origins of this particular variant are more common than ever. Conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine narratives that dissuade people from getting vaccinated are perhaps just as dangerous to misinformation-vulnerable populations as the threat of the new variant itself.

CNN: Hospital CEO - Covid patients are dying ‘at a rate we’ve never seen before, December 10, 2021.

NBC: How US Social Media Conspiracy Theories Made Other Countries Skeptical Of The Covid Vaccine, November 30, 2021.

PEW: Misinformation and the Coronavirus Vaccines, March 12, 2021.

About Alexandra Bowman

Alexandra Bowman is World War Zero's cartoonist in residence. She is a political cartoonist and satirist, creating work with The Lincoln Project and environmental newsletter Our Daily Planet. Bowman's illustrations have been published by BBC News, BBC Books, Puffin Books, the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service, the National Wildlife Federation, and Penguin Random House UK. As a rising senior at Georgetown University, she is double majoring in English and Art and will be graduating early with a Master's in English in May 2023. Bowman also founded The Hilltop Show, a political comedy webseries run by over 50 undergraduate and graduate student members from around the world, and serves as its host and Lead Satirical Writer.