This year, a deadly virus emerged in an organic fashion, killed a lot of people, and, according to the experts, the only way to keep it from killing way, way more people and also overwhelming hospitals was for everyone to just quarantine at home and be very careful and wear masks and observe certain protocols whenever they did need to leave their houses. For areas that did this, it worked pretty well. The rates of infection have gone down, while they've gone up in areas that have refused to do this. It seems like everything pretty much makes sense.

But that's not a very exciting explanation, and it makes people who don't like smug scientists or engaging in even the smallest personal sacrifice to prevent other people from getting sick and dying feel bad and annoyed. Thus, in May, another, more satisfying explanation emerged, in the form of a documentary called Plandemic. This documentary featured the good kind of scientist — the kind that cannot actually do science anywhere anymore because of how often their work has been discredited and the fact that they were arrested for having a co-worker steal research and notebooks from the lab they were just fired from (over being discredited).

In this version of events, that smug scientist who was on TV every day thinking he was better than everyone and telling them what to do actually invented the virus himself, and also all of the things he and all of the other scientists were telling people to do — specifically the very things that inconvenienced people the most, like quarantining, social distancing and mask-wearing — were actually bad.