Though we may have not all transformed into Zombies the moment FEMA sent out a mass emergency alert at 2:2— sorry, 2:18 pm — on Wednesday, some conspiracy theorists aren’t taking their L in stride, arguing that maybe the real conspiracy theories were none other than the conspiracy theories themselves.


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For several weeks leading up to the alert, QAnon and other far-right influencers warned their disciples that the test — one designed to see if our Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts could effectively convey information surrounding national emergencies — would actually “activate” diseases in people who had received the Covid-19 vaccine.


“Turn off your cell phones on October 4th,” wrote Twitter user @GinaShirah81815. 


In late September. “The EBS is going to "test" the system using 5G. This will activate the Marburg virus in people who have been vaccinated. And sadly turn some of them into zombies.”



But even though these theories were resoundingly disproven after the FEMA alert failed to spark an I Am Legend-esque doomsday,  some tin foil hat-wearers still had suspicions, heading to Reddit with claims that that the false zombie conspiracy was actually part of a bigger conspiracy designed to distract the masses.


“I believe some ‘conspiracies’ that are laughably stupid are being intentionally promoted as a social manipulation mechanism to nuke legitimate discussions,” wrote u/Prestigious-Cup-4239 in a post shared to r/conspiracy.


“If you attempt to find any discussion of the tests it is drowned out by zombie talk and people mocking those that believed that and got scared,” they continued, citing the fact that Russia also ran an emergency test on Wednesday.


But u/Prestigious-Cup-4239 was far from alone in feeling as though the talk of an IRL Walking Dead reboot distracted from other allegedly more legitimate conspiracies surrounding the test.


“They're just astroturfing, don't feed into it,” wrote u/svabhavikakaya in another post shared to the same subreddit.


“This ‘5G graphene Marburg zombie’ ---- is a fabricated distraction from the discovery of DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines,” they continued, referencing a debunked conspiracy theory surrounding the Covid-19 vaccines.


Meanwhile, u/kufsi held out hope, arguing that though they don’t buy into the concept of a zombie doomsday, there is a chance it could still come to fruition.


“The original idea was Marburg, which would have a long incubation period,” they added. “Despite that, I don’t believe the zombie thing.”


But regardless of whether we’ll all soon be craving brains thanks to FEMA, there’s one conspiracy theory that this whole ordeal has most definitely proven correct — there’s nothing conspiracy theorists love than a good, meta conspiracy.