Conspiracy Beliefs, Rejection of Vaccination, and Support for hydroxychloroquine
Many conspiracy theories appeared along with the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has been proposed that these beliefs are a response to psychological needs and might constitute attempts to understand complex, otherwise hardly understandable and predictable threatening situations . Hence, it is not surprising that conspiracy beliefs have flourished with the COVID-19 pandemic, and that medical misinformation spreads at a spectacular rate,
Interestingly, conspiracy beliefs also surged during the 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic (Spinney, 2017) and the 2009 H1N1 outbreak.
