Chapter 1: Where Your Fear Begins

Colin McAdam

This is an excerpt from the newly released book “Canary In a Covid World; How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World” which is available on Amazon here.

Colin McAdam has a PhD from Cambridge University and is an internationally acclaimed novelist. He has written for Harpers, Granta, Salon and Hazlitt, among other journals, and his books have won or been shortlisted for several prizes including the Amazon Best First Novel award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Giller, GGs and the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent novel is BLACKDOVE, a story about genetic editing and the adventures of a grieving father and son.

My business is telling stories. I think, all the time, about the role of them in our lives, how much we need stories, how our need for them distinguishes us from other apes yet serves an ape function of protecting our groups: stories in the form of scripture, shared collections of tales that we can unite around or use to exclude others; fairy tales we can tell to prepare our children for their journeys in the woods.

Stories can warn us, scare us, light up the darkness, chase away boredom. And they can also make us brave.

I think the word ‘narrative’ has never been more commonly used than it has over the past three years – sometimes a substitute for ‘spin’, always a synonym of ‘story’.

To some, the story of COVID goes like this: a virus of zoonotic origin jumped species and was spread in a wet market in Wuhan; it burned indiscriminately through populations in Iran and Italy, and carried on throughout the world; it is dangerous for old and young, causes long-term disabilities, and even though it is airborne it can be contained by locking down populations for certain periods of time and is mitigated if everyone wears a mask, gets vaccinated multiple times, and stays six feet apart in well-ventilated spaces if not apart completely.

To others the story starts with a lab in Wuhan, with gain-offunction research conducted either to develop bioweapons or to help understand theoretical pandemics; the virus’s furin cleavage site and genome reveal it is man-made; it probably began spreading long before we realized; it is harmful only to the very ill and the very old, is not contracted by everyone, even within small settings, and is for the most part experienced as a cold or flu; and, like the flu, the vaccines given for it (which are mostly not vaccines but experimental gene therapies) are often not effective in reducing transmission or severity (and are sometimes dangerous themselves).

One of these stories is told by the mainstream media, and the other has largely been censored……..

Continue reading this essay in the book: Canary In a Covid World; How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World. A collection of essays from 34 contemporary thought leaders. Available on Amazon here: