Epidemiology of conspiracy: Infected vaccines, infectious patients, and superspreaders for hire.

Abstract

This article traces the viral life of HIV conspiracies in Turkey, not as peripheral noise but as central to the ways public health crises are interpreted, contested, and experienced. By offering "epidemiology of conspiracy" both as a metaphor and an analytic, the article treats disease conspiracies not as epistemological failures, but as vernacular tools of meaning making-fragile yet forceful ways of navigating biopolitical abandonment, institutional opacity, and medical precarity. The paper examines three distinct conspiratorial narratives-ranging from infected vaccines to murderous patients to superspreaders hired by Big Pharma-and argues that these stories, while often dismissed as illogical or paranoid, are saturated with socio-political meaning and historical memory. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reparative, rather than dismissive, reading of conspiracy in medical anthropology, especially when studying epidemics in places where data is scarce, speech is policed, and stigma circulates with viral efficiency.