The battle between Covid-19 conspiracies left only losers, no winners

As Covid-19 was silently spreading around the world in the early days of the pandemic, so too did questions about where it came from.

Rife with unfounded speculation, conspiracy theorists shared their views. It was a biological weapon they alleged. It escaped from a top secret military lab, others offered. This continues today, with profound consequences for public health.

But once shared, conspiracy theories quickly took on a life of their own. For their believers, surely the fact that so many believed in their specific theory meant it was the truth?

Superspreader conspiracies fought for the spotlight and a chance to command the narrative. Some governments even utilised them, realising the value they offered in shifting responsibility from themselves to a mysterious, unfounded party shrouded in secrecy and ill intent.

But why did conspiracy theories burn through the population faster than Covid-19 itself? An international poll conducted by YouGov reveals a significant number of people don’t believe in the vaccine’s effectiveness. In France, 48 percent, and nearly half of US respondents effectively came across as anti-vaxxers.

For public health officials, that’s a catastrophe in the making, ensuring that vaccines can’t accomplish the task of creating enough herd immunity to stall the virus. Instead, it promises a longer pandemic, more suffering and death.

Road to hell

What made it all possible? Innocently enough, a natural curiosity about the virus created an environment ripe for the rise of Covid-19 conspiracy theories. Then came the lack of knowledge, and not necessarily due to a failure of authority. Early on into the pandemic, making definitive statements without data and hard results simply wasn’t possible. 

So conspiracies beat the authorities to the punch lines. In weeks, unknown figures were suddenly touted as ‘experts’. Anonymous users on social media claimed high-level security clearances.

Governments didn’t sit idly by either, pushing narratives that aligned with their motives.

In a sweeping investigation, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab carried out a nine-month inquiry to untangle the web of people and institutions behind the most viral conspiracies about Covid-19. All made disastrous claims, with unverifiable facts or no evidence at all. In their own way, they propagated a different kind of pandemic at a time when the world was ill equipped to handle it. 

Patient Zero

The coronavirus pandemic quickly exposed old political fault lines. It wasn’t long before stories of the virus became weaponised for political ends. China fanned the flames, allegedly without malice, by downplaying the outbreak in Wuhan, China during December 2019.

Once the severity of the epidemic had set in, conspiracies quickly took root that were more hidden. Claims emerged that the virus was actually a bioweapon released on the public, drowning out other rational voices urging immediate action to contain the pending global health crisis.

DFRLab, in cooperation with the Associated Press, studied the information landscape during the first six months of the outbreak, detailing how harmless conspiracy theories would go on to impact geopolitics at the highest levels.

The bioweapon conspiracy was particularly popular in the United States. In a seamless transition, the conspiracy was such a topic of conversation that it entered the mainstream. From anonymous advocates on social media, their ideas quickly became talking points for US President Donald Trump, pundits and celebrities.

While some of it was rooted in a legitimate concern that the virus could have been released by accident from a lab, there is still no evidence found to back that claim.

Profit to be had

China wasn’t going to be outdone, pushing its own narrative, blaming the United States military for the outbreak. After all, admitting responsibility to the population would severely erode public trust in government at a time when it would be needed the most.

Russia was close behind, disseminating its own brand of information that aligned with its own motives: the US, long apprehensive of China’s rising might, had targeted the world’s most populous country with a bioweapon.

Other actors followed in their footsteps. Iran, faced with one of the highest Covid-19 death rates in the world, quickly claimed it was intentionally targeted.

Information chaos

Not all were fooled. On February 2 2020, the World Health Organization warned that too much inaccurate information was drowning out “trustworthy sources”.

It was official. The world was in the grip of an “infodemic”, as the WHO called it. As the conspiracies spread, so did the mistrust, fear and suspicion.

To manage it, different countries took varying approaches based on their priorities. 

China, Russia and Iran cracked down on dissent and enforced public order. The US saw elected leaders try to juggle the needs of the public health crisis with what their voters were convinced was the truth. At times, it wasn’t clear which came first. 

Then there were consequences.

As the virus leaped from host to host, multiplying steadily around the world, there was little time to act. That time was cut short even more by the rise of provocative, sensationalist conspiracy theories, with real life impact.

Instead of cooperation between nations, and sharing knowledge, details and best-practices; countries played a high-strung blame game, with little facts to go around. In their own sinister way, the competition of theories only made people lose faith in their governments and officials. When health officials called for social distancing and mandatory face masks, many didn’t comply.

Move and countermove

For many governments, it was still business as usual. In China, journalists, doctors, and experts were rounded up and imprisoned. Abroad, China worked hard at maintaining that Covid-19 was a US bioweapon.

In the US, this was met by a counter-narrative: former President Donald Trump’s claim the virus originated in a Wuhan lab, even suggesting it may have been intentional. For days after, pundits came as close as they could to insinuating that China was responsible without blatantly saying so. Emotions were high, and with it came a wave of xenophobia that spread through social media.

Not long after, memes and social media posts shared pictures of ‘Chinese cuisine’, disparaging foods involving exotic animals that likely caused the virus. In the unfiltered comments section, keyboard warriors jeered at how ‘unhygienic’ the Chinese were. They brought it on themselves, others boldly asserted.

Like a genie let loose from the bottle, and no matter the political or geopolitical motives behind them, conspiracy theories have done immense damage in the fight against the virus. In the end, no one’s interests have been served.