Study ties COVID vaccine conspiracy theories to distrust of government, mainstream media

If you've been wondering "What's wrong with these people?"

Meghan Holohan

As soon as the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began early in the pandemic, conspiracy theories about them started swirling. Some people claimed that the vaccines contained microchips, while others were suspicious about the intentions of the government or pharmaceutical companies. 

Researchers surveyed people in Japan about their beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories to understand who adheres to such ideas. The findings were published last week in Scientific Reports.

“When people think about conspiracy beliefs, attention often focuses on highly extreme claims,” lead author Hitoshi Yamamoto, PhD, of Rissho University in Tokyo, said in a university press release. “However, our findings suggest that more common forms of conspiracy-related thinking are associated with the persistent distrust of social institutions and the mainstream media.” 

2 types of conspiracy theorists

Yamamoto and his team looked at annual survey data from 2020 to 2024 to understand which media people used, how they felt about the media, and their media literacy, as well as how these factors affected their beliefs in vaccine conspiracy theories. 

The researchers noticed that people who subscribed to vaccine conspiracy theories fell into two groups. Some people did not trust the government and pharmaceutical companies and believed they hide information from the public on such topics as a purported connection between vaccines and autism (ie, institutional conspiracy beliefs). 

The second, smaller group, adhered to implausible conspiracy beliefs such as the idea that vaccines contained microchips that could track people. 

Anti-establishment attitudes, populist worldviews 

People who held institutional conspiracy beliefs were younger, were skeptical of mass media, and did not engage regularly with traditional media. As the pandemic continued, their suspicions deepened. 

“These findings suggest that institutional distrust does not merely reflect responses to pandemic-related information but may instead reflect broader, relatively stable orientations toward social and informational institutions,” the authors wrote. “This aligns with prior research linking conspiracy beliefs to anti-establishment attitudes and populist worldviews.” 

Understanding those who believed implausible conspiracy beliefs was more difficult because few people in the survey reported such thoughts. 

“Given the low prevalence of such beliefs in our sample, statistical analyses should be interpreted with caution,” the authors said. “While some results hinted at associations with changing social media use, our data do not allow us to determine clear causal mechanisms.” 

The researchers said that future studies of conspiracy theories should consider the two types individually.  

“Institutional conspiracy beliefs were widespread and systematically related to media skepticism and distrust toward authorities, whereas implausible conspiracy beliefs remained rare and should therefore be interpreted more cautiously,” they wrote.