They Built the Camps Before the Outbreak
The plan, as reconstructed by the people who believed there was a plan, ran as follows: the WHO, working in concert with several pharmaceutical companies and cooperative governments, had engineered the swine flu in a laboratory. The coming vaccination campaign—Germany’s health ministry wanted to inoculate 22.5 million people that autumn—would actually deliver two different shots. One would protect you. The other would not. The 800-plus concentration camps already constructed across the United States, maintained, staffed, and completely empty, officially described as overflow facilities for undocumented immigration, were intended for whoever survived the culling as functional slave labor. The doctors, nurses, and police would be vaccinated first, which would also conveniently remove them from the board. Austrian journalist Jane Bürgermeister had filed criminal charges against the WHO. The FBI was apparently involved. Uwe Boll, presumably, was somewhere sharpening a pencil.
I want to be honest about my position at the time: I found this approximately 60% hilarious and 40% unsettling, which feels about right given the available evidence. Roche really had forecast rising Tamiflu sales before the outbreak became public—the kind of detail that doesn’t prove anything but makes you sit with it for a moment longer than you should. The virus was real and people were dying from it, including some prominent cases that resolved suspiciously mildly. That’s the exact texture of coincidence that conspiracy thinking feeds on.
What I didn’t anticipate in 2009 was how load-bearing the underlying paranoia would turn out to be. Not the concentration camp mythology specifically—that predates swine flu by decades—but the broader conviction that vaccination campaigns are cover stories, that the institutions managing a health crisis are also engineering it, that survival is a matter of being on the right list. That framework didn’t dissolve when H1N1 faded. It just waited.
If none of it was true, I said at the time, at least you’d get a bad film out of it. Real life eventually made the material redundant anyway.