Dressing a Corpse for Dinner: Five Tricks That Make Bad COVID-19 Claims Look Convincing — And How to Spot Them

By /

Here is how to spot five common tricks used in COVID-19 misinformation, from cherry-picking data to shifting definitions, with clear examples and science-based tips to protect yourself from false claims. This guide highlights how to recognise and reject persuasive but misleading pandemic narratives and Bad COVID-19 Claims.

Science vs. Misinformation

Science can withstand scrutiny: it is transparent, peer-reviewed, and converges across independent lines of evidence. Misinformation often borrows the look of credibility — official colours, government-style layout, data charts — but relies on rhetorical tricks, cherry-picked facts, and unverified claims to mislead. Once you can spot the patterns, they lose their power. Like lipstick on a pig, when you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Polishing a turd

Some publications — styled to look like official inquiries — present themselves as “what really happened” accounts of the pandemic. They can feel persuasive before you’ve even read them because they use the same cognitive shortcuts we use to judge trustworthiness in legitimate science.

5 Tactics to Watch For

The trick: Selecting time periods, populations, or endpoints that support the narrative while ignoring the rest.
Example: Quoting excess mortality spikes from one quarter in 2022 and attributing them to vaccines — without mentioning concurrent COVID-19 waves, healthcare disruptions, or long-term trend data.
Why it works: Our brains notice patterns in isolated data points but rarely ask “what’s missing?”
Reality check: Epidemiologists look at complete datasets, multiple time points, and control for confounding before drawing conclusions (Epidemiology 101).

The trick: Using official-looking charts, fonts, and colour schemes to create authority, while altering scales, omitting denominators, or failing to cite sources.
Example: A bar chart showing “adverse events” without adjusting for number of doses given — making it look like events are skyrocketing when rates per million are stable.
Why it works: Visual cues of “officialdom” activate trust heuristics (McGrew et al., 2019).
Reality check: Always check the axis scale, the denominator, and whether the figure cites a verifiable data source.

The trick: Claiming authorities “changed the definition” of words like vaccine, case, or pandemic to hide truths.
Example: Misrepresenting WHO’s 2009 revision of the pandemic definition or the CDC’s clarification of “vaccine” wording to align with mRNA technology.
Why it works: Changes can sound suspicious if you don’t know that scientific language evolves with technology and the accumulation of knowledge. If we did not evolve our langualge how would we describe our new gizmos?
Reality check: Definitions in science and medicine are updated for clarity, accuracy, and legal alignment — often after public consultation and with archived versions still publicly available (Pandemic and Vaccine).

The trick: Suggesting a coordinated, malicious cover-up that explains away all counterevidence. Certainly makes things easier!
Example: Any data contradicting the claim is dismissed as “censored” or “paid for,” making the theory unfalsifiable.
Why it works: Conspiracy logic offers certainty in uncertainty, tapping into distrust of institutions (van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018) and fear.
Reality check: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — not just speculation. If there’s no direct, verifiable proof, treat it as unproven.

A real-world cautionary tale

In 2023, a study tested how easily people could be swayed by a professional-looking COVID-19 misinformation report shared on Facebook. Even among those with university degrees, a third believed false vaccine claims when they were embedded in a glossy PDF. The layout, not the content, did most of the persuading. This “illusion of authority” works because we shortcut trust to visual markers like formatting, logos, and charts — a mental habit that bad actors exploit.

Further reading

Discover more from

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Related Posts

Scroll to Top

Discover more from

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading