Thanks Pete Zahut for your post. People with the weird ideas you gave examples of should read a book by Carl Sagan called The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. The book is copyright 1996. The back cover of a paperback edition from 1997 gives a good description of the book - one that is relevant to the discussion about Covid-19 vaccines. It says the following.
"How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly
technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between
the myths of pseudoscience, New Age thinking, and fundamentalist zealotry and the testable hypotheses of science?
Casting
a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and
authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as
witchcraft, faith healings, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in
today’s so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning, with
stories of alien abduction, "channeling" past lives, and communal
hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason
is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness
that threatens our most basic freedoms."
Chapter one of the book says the following.
"As amusing as some of pseudoscience may seem, as confident as we may be that we would never be so gullible as to be swept up by such a doctrine, we know it's happening all around us. Transcendental Meditation and Aum Shinriko seem to have attracted a large number of accomplished people, some with advanced degrees in physics or engineering. These are not doctrines for nitwits. Something else is going on.
What's more, no one interested in what religions are and how they begin can ignore them. While vast barriers may seem to stretch between a local, single-focus contention of pseudoscience and something like a world religion, the partitions are very thin."
In chapter two Sagan says the following.
"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."