Quarter of Brits believe coronavirus conspiracies

"We do not consent."

"Take your freedom back."

Many here don’t believe in COVID-19. Or think their lives should change because of it. And many of them refuse to be vaccinated against it.

"I don't want to be vaccinated, I want to be free, I want to live my life, I want all my friends to live their lives. The pandemic is a hoax, The pandemic is a hoax. It's a cover-up while they reset the whole economy."

Experts are warning that a sizeable minority of people in Britain believe conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines.

They say they’re shocked at how fast this kind of misinformation can spread and how easily it’s taken as fact.

Daniel Freeman is a psychology professor at Oxford University:

"What we're finding is in the wake of the pandemic, that conspiracy beliefs may have gone mainstream, that they're no longer confined to the fringes. So around half the population isn't thinking in terms of conspiracy beliefs at all, but around a quarter are entertaining such thoughts. Another quarter are consistently thinking in terms of conspiracy beliefs, and around one in 10 people seem to have a very high rate of endorsement of conspiracy beliefs."

Just as countries prepare to launch mass vaccination programs, they’ll also need to convince some of the population to take part.

Leila Hay is a student in the northern English city of Hull. She says it’s easy to get sucked in to believing what you read about vaccines and the pandemic.

Even though she now says it has no basis in truth.

"I was looking at a lot of groups, and they were just there for anyone to go into, they were very public and had a lot of followers. And so there were like thousands of people who were sharing so much information. And so it was literally all day you could go on them and you'd be constantly discovering something new, constantly coming across something different."

Logging online, the internet is full of rumors and false information.

Views like the pandemic was fabricated by governments to control people.

Or that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wanted to use vaccines to insert trackable microchips into people.

Tom Phillips, editor at fact-checking charity Full Fact, says rumors and false information during pandemics have been around for centuries.

But some of the theories Leila once believed came via QAnon: A platform that has become a "big tent" conspiracy theory -- encompassing misinformation about topics ranging from alien landings to vaccine safety.

"What we've also seen is that the online space provides a really fertile environment for different conspiracy theories that already existed to merge and kind of center around the pandemic. So we've seen pre-existing anti-vaccination beliefs. We've seen pre-existing concerns around 5G technology. We've been seeing pre-existing conspiracy theories about a new world order type conspiracies. These are all kind of merged and they've been brought together because they're suddenly all talking about one news event and the online space gives them the opportunity to cross over between each other."

The fight to find a vaccine may have been won.

But there’s another conflict brewing as governments now need to convince their populations about the best way to protect themselves.