It began in a wildlife market in Hubei province when an infected animal – a bat, possibly of the vampiric sort? – somehow transferred the virus to a human, setting off a chain effect that we’re only now experiencing.

Or did it?

Is this species jump the true story? Isn’t it more likely that coronavirus was passed on, deliberately or inadvertently, by the hundreds of US athletes who took part in the Military World Games in Wuhan in October last year?

This conspiracy theory of dastardly Yankee deeds has been postulated by an extremely senior Chinese official and so far has not been shot down by his government – indeed, leading scientists there have promoted it. Zhao Lijian, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, has been tweeting his theory to his 300,000 followers, without yet offering up telling evidence.

Zhao has risen quickly through the diplomatic ranks for his defence of his country in tweets, although most of his own folk won’t have seen his views because Western social media, principally Twitter, is banned in the country. He bases his theory on answers the director for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, gave to a US Congressional committee on Wednesday. Redfield said that some supposed influenza deaths had later been identified as Covid-19, the coronavirus, without giving times of deaths or any identifying details.

But it’s not as if conspiracy theories are defeated by details, these tend to reinforce the held belief – and the person steadfastly clinging to it isn’t some sad, middle-aged man wearing a tinfoil helmet living in his parents’ basement, but you and me, because we all hold them, although not all are totally wacky. The demographic data on belief in conspiracies cuts across social class, age and gender, and favours neither left nor right. Whatever age or sex we are, wherever we feature on the political spectrum, we harbour some.

Perhaps we harbour them because we distrust politicians and experts? Trump’s regular fake news hollers have had effect. Or is it that we see conspiracies because while we can recognise patterns and regularities, we try to put significance to them when they’re random ... or just exactly as they appear to be?

What is common to all is the need to pin the event on an evildoer. So it was actually George W Bush who planned the Twin Towers, killing thousands of people, and Barack Obama’s administration was actually a puppet one, controlled by a wealthy elite – the deep state, the Illuminati, New World Order ... take your pick or invent your own.

For almost every major event there’s an alternative explanation. Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide? The two guards either went awol – deliberately – or they facilitated the hanging.

9/11? The US government was complicit as it gave it the excuse for the “War on Terror” and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The complicity? The 7 World Trade Center building was clearly brought down in a controlled explosion because it concertinaed down on itself rather than toppling. Never mind that aerospace and civil engineers dismiss it – and that any conspiracy would have involved thousands, not one of whom has so far broken cover – this only cements the belief.

If you take is as fact that there is a deep or secret state – a New World Order, the Bilderbergers, the Illuminati (who were obviously the architects of the French Revolution) – then you will know that their headquarters are in an underground city below Denver International Airport, the above-ground clues being the Masonic and alleged satanic symbols, as well as a set of murals which depict war and death. At Heathrow or Edinburgh it’s rather more conventional signage, for Wetherspoon’s or McDonald’s, which some would argue play their own part in a conspiracy against our wellbeing.

You also may not have quite understood that the current fashion trend for ripped jeans is in fact a cover and a means of communication through the specific kinds of rips and holes between secret agents and their collaborators. So, be warned, if you accidentally put your knee through a pair you may well end up on an espionage charge.

This ripping yarn was promulgated by a Turkish Islamist newspaper, set off by president Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has patented his conspiracy theory of ust akil, or mastermind, which involves a command and control centre somewhere within the US Government which orchestrates every blow against Turkey, from earthquakes to Kurdish socialists taking up arms against the state.

Going back a bit – and some would argue still present today – is anti-Catholicism, specifically that the Pope is the Antichrist, and that Catholics are involved in a secret plot against states through all sorts of evil rituals and devilish conspiracies.

In 1853, a Scottish bigot, or minister, called Alexander Hislop published a pamphlet claiming that the Catholic Church is secretly a continuation of

the ancient pagan religion of Babylon and that Christmas and Easter have nothing to do with Christ but are pagan festivals. Absolute bunkum, obviously, but you may well find adherents within the more extreme expressions of political belief and religious faiths ... even if they have never heard of Hislop.

The ingenious ways conspiracy theorists find to put the alternative interpretation to established events – the ultimate reverse ferret – is astounding.

From the documentaries, films

and more than 1,000 books on the shooting of JFK, to the fake moon landing “proved” to be so because the US flag was out and horizontal when there’s no wind on the planet (Buzz Aldrin decked a theorist who accused him of being part of the charade), to the claim that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut didn’t happen, or rather was staged by actors.

Mix in the “hoax” of global warming, aliens landing at Roswell, that Elvis is actually still alive, but probably not working in a chip shop, and Paul isn’t – and best of all that the shooting of education campaigner Malala Yousafzai was carried out by Robert De Niro disguised as an Uzbek homeopath – and you have a heady brew of intoxicating balderdash.

These theories spread like epidemics themselves, apparently coming out of nowhere and all but impossible to

treat. Certainly not by fact or logic.

One theory is that they flourish when there is a huge gap between the government and the governed, and experts are seen as being out of touch with “the people”.

In 2017, in the Brexit campaign, Michael Gove, now Minister for the Cabinet Office, claimed that “people in this country have had enough of experts”, although he later narrowed that down to the established ones.

Sometimes conspiracy theories do work out. Like when you play the runoff track to Sergeant Pepper backwards you hear the Beatles say “been so high” and “never could be any other way”, or when you type Illuminati backwards into your computer and add .com it takes you to the site of the US National Security Agency ... and, of course, there’s the mystery of why the word “gullible” doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary*.

If you wonder if they put a bug in your computer then you’ve hatched another one.

* No, that would be daft. It’s the word “tube” that’s missing.