From Critical Thinkers to Conspiracy Theorists: How the College-Educated, Urban Middle-Class Became Entangled in the Infodemic

Conspiracy theories started growing more popular within the well-educated middle-class during the COVID-19 pandemic. The effort by governments and media outlets to combat misinformation backfired spectacularly. By framing all skepticism as “conspiracy thinking”, public health institutions weakened their own legitimacy in the eyes of ”critical thinkers”.

At 1 AM on Sunday, May 18, 2023, I received a WhatsApp notification from Amy, a UK-based contact. She had sent me a Facebook link.

Amy, an expatriate living in the UK, had trained and worked as a nurse for over 20 years. Curious, I clicked on the video and found myself watching a scene in Trafalgar Square, London.

A sixty-something-year-old man, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, was addressing a large audience on the steps. Behind him, five people held a massive yellow banner that read:

“Crimes Against Humanity.”

In the center of the banner, an oversized syringe filled with blood was flanked by two black-ink drawings of Death wielding a scythe. Other protesters held smaller signs:

• Would your government harm you?
• Would Big Pharma kill for profit?
• Vax-Injured Need Justice.

The man in the video was Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former vice-president of Pfizer’s respiratory research division, where he had worked for over 16 years before leaving the company in 2011.

As I listened, he spoke with urgency:

”There is strong evidence,” he declared, ”of a supranational plot to pretend that there’s one crisis after another to which you have to react. On this occasion, an infectious disease. This is a murderous attack on humanity. It starts above the level of nations.”

I sat back, staring at my phone screen.

Amy—highly educated, a trained medical professional—had not just watched this video. She had shared it with me, endorsing its message.

That was the moment I realized something critical: Conspiracy theories had breached the walls of the educated, urban middle class.

A Fringe Phenomenon No Longer?

In the early months of the pandemic, conspiracy theories exploded across social media. At first, they focused on the origin of the virus—whether it was real or a hoax, whether it came from a lab or occurred naturally, whether it was a bioweapon designed to control the population.

But as the pandemic unfolded, these theories mutated and adapted. Now, they weren’t just about the virus itself—they extended to lockdowns, masks, vaccines, testing, and government responses.

Governments and global institutions reacted swiftly. By February 2020, the WHO was already warning against ”dangerous fake news” about the virus. Mainstream media took up the charge, amplifying new derogatory labels for skeptics: ”Covidiots,” ”Morona,” ”Maskholes.”

Psychologists, sociologists, and public health experts framed the rise of conspiracy theories as a cognitive failure—a psychological response to fear and uncertainty. The dominant view suggested that people turned to conspiracy theories as a way to cope with chaos, a maladaptive response to stress.

But as I listened to Amy, and as I spoke with other well-educated individuals who had embraced pandemic-related conspiracies, I realized this framework was insufficient.

It assumed that conspiracy theorists were on the fringes of society—misinformed, alienated, or lacking critical thinking skills.

But if that were true, how did so many highly educated professionals get pulled in?

How the Middle Class Fell Down the Rabbit Hole

The assumption that conspiracy theories only appeal to the uninformed does not hold up to scrutiny. During my fieldwork, I met doctors, scientists, engineers, and university professors who had adopted alternative pandemic narratives. Many were people with stable careers and privileged socio-economic backgrounds—individuals trained in evidence-based thinking.

Like Amy, some of them were medical professionals. Others, like Charles, were scientists.

Charles, a German biologist, became involved in pandemic-skeptic communities after reading official data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s leading public health agency.

”The way they presented the numbers made no sense,” he told me. ”They were publishing absolute death counts instead of death rates. The methodology was flawed. I don’t know if they were lying, but they were definitely manipulating the perception of risk.”

For Charles, the inconsistencies in government reporting were enough to make him question the entire narrative.

For Amy, the turning point was the introduction of the concept of asymptomatic transmission.

”My medical training told me this was impossible,” she said. ”A virus can only spread during the symptomatic stage. If I have no symptoms, I cannot transmit it. But suddenly, we were told the opposite. That’s when I knew something was wrong.”

Both Amy and Charles started with specific doubts, but in their search for answers, they fell deeper into alternative media spaces. They didn’t see themselves as conspiracy theorists—they saw themselves as critical thinkers who had been forced to go outside the system to find the ”truth.”

And they weren’t alone.

Did Governments Unintentionally Radicalize Skeptics?

By the end of 2020, scientific discourse about the pandemic had become politically charged. Governments and media outlets, in their effort to combat misinformation, engaged in a public relations campaign that backfired spectacularly.

Medical experts who deviated from the official line were silenced. Doctors who questioned vaccine safety lost their jobs. Social media platforms aggressively censored alternative viewpoints.

For many, these actions confirmed their suspicions.

Amy put it bluntly:
”If the science was solid, why did they need to shut people up?”

Instead of reinforcing trust, these censorship efforts pushed skeptical individuals further into alternative networks, where they became radicalized.

By framing all dissent as “conspiracy thinking,” institutions may have created exactly what they feared: a new class of outcasts who no longer viewed public health institutions as legitimate.

Final Thoughts: Science vs. Conspiracies—A False Dichotomy?

One of the biggest ironies of the COVID-19 era is that both sides weaponized science—yet science itself was lost in the battle.

Governments presented scientific conclusions as absolute facts, leaving little room for questioning or debate. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists used pseudo-scientific rhetoric to lend credibility to their claims. Both camps treated science as an ideological weapon rather than as an evolving process of discovery.

By branding all dissent as “misinformation,” institutions closed off the space for genuine scientific inquiry. This raises other important questions:

• When does skepticism turn into denialism?
• Who gets to define what is “misinformation”?
• And what happens when an entire group of people—like Amy and Charles—no longer trusts the system at all?

These are the questions I explore in the next post titled “From Dissent to Denial: How Alternative Narratives Become ”Negationism.”