The Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Targeting 5G Technology, Bill Gates, and a World of Fear
Over Easter weekend, arsonists set more than twenty 5G cellular towers in the United Kingdom on fire—forming a pattern of bunny-eared infernos that points to one of the many conspiracy theories surrounding the spread of the novel coronavirus. The basic idea is that 5G, a new generation of wireless communication, is responsible for the coronavirus crisis, and the idea has spread rapidly. According to some surveys, it is now the most widely disseminated pandemic-related conspiracy theory in the U.K., and has spread in Europe (there have been cell-tower attacks in the Netherlands and Belgium) and in the United States (where the actor Woody Harrelson posted about it on Instagram, albeit with a note saying that he hadn’t “fully vetted it”). The theory is false: the illness COVID-19 is caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which is highly contagious. But the first question when confronting the theory is how people could even believe that 5G could be responsible. The answer provides the framework for something of a general taxonomy of conspiracy theories, each of which is disorienting and distinct but in related ways.
There are, it turns out, many 5G coronavirus theories, and no simple hierarchy of plausibility. Some adherents have adopted the notion that the 5G frequency spectrum somehow transmits and spreads the virus, as if in a wireless miasma. This variety of theory doesn’t posit any rational connection between the cause and the supposed effect; it seems to rely solely on the perception that both are new and frightening. It is scoffed at by those who prefer to believe that there is no such thing as SARS-CoV-2, and that the story of the virus’s emergence was cooked up to hide the disastrous health effects of 5G itself. Here, bad faith and coördinated lying on a mass scale are assumed to be simpler explanations than those offered by virology.
Both these ideas are looked down on by conspiracy theorists whose medical knowledge, such as it is, tends to be garnered from online venues, and who have decided that 5G destroys the immune system and has thus transmuted a harmless coronavirus into something deadly. (This group bears a family resemblance to anti-vaxxers, and includes some people whose suspicions about the health effects of 5G predate the current crisis.) These theorists display as “proof” side-by-side maps showing the density of COVID-19 cases and of 5G towers. But, as the A.P. noted, all the maps show is that places with more people have more of both. However, even arguing about maps misses the basic point that there is no scientific basis for the idea that waves from towers could harm the immune system. In any event, these theorists would be viewed as amateurs by those who argue not only that powerful people are deploying 5G towers to spread the virus but that the proof of this scheme is to be found on the United Kingdom’s new twenty-pound note, which began circulating in February. Social-media videos point out that a metallic element on the note includes the image of a tower, which, when you tilt it, seems to be emitting rays—5G, of course—and that a design above the tower resembles the circle-with-spines shape of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In fact, the images depict a lighthouse in the seaside town of Margate and a stylized view of the rotunda of the Tate Gallery, in London, both places associated with the artist J. M. W. Turner, whose portrait is on the new bill. But even the theorists’ basic message is unclear: Is the idea that the notes are a call to action, to rouse a doomsday cult that has somehow infiltrated the Bank of England? Perhaps, in the end, many of those sharing the videos are doing nothing more than looking for omens.
None of this is harmless: if people believe that they are being deceived—or even targeted—by public-health authorities, why would they follow their directives? Why, to note another widely prevalent family of coronavirus conspiracy theories, would they allow their children to eventually receive a COVID-19 vaccine if they believe that the pandemic was engineered by, say, Bill Gates, in an effort to depopulate an overcrowded planet and, while he’s at it, to inject people with free-will-subduing microdots? One version of this theory has been promoted in a YouTube video, posted by the Law of Liberty Baptist Church, which now has almost two million views, and another is featured in social-media posts by Diamond and Silk, who are fixtures at Trump rallies, but other variations have popped up around the world. (Needless to say, this is absurd. Gates has pledged a quarter of a billion dollars to the effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine; as thanks, he has been subject to death threats.) But the corollary is that when politicians and public-health authorities forfeit trust, they cause real harm by creating a space that conspiracy theorists rush to fill. In that sense, not all the blame can be placed on the most credulous members of the public. The human imagination abhors a vacuum. And, in dysfunctional political cultures, much like the present one, there is a conspiratorialist feedback loop: the less you trust, the more you search for alternative authorities, and the more susceptible you are to untrustworthy figures who maintain their position by attacking what is true.
People are especially vulnerable to unfounded theories regarding the coronavirus, for several reasons. One is that the economic effect of closures has been devastating, and has left people desperate for alternatives—perhaps it is all being exaggerated, and it would be fine to go back to work? And why aren’t more powerful, better-situated people doing more to help them—is someone benefitting from their distress? Another reason is that so much about COVID-19 remains unclear. As more has become known, advice from government authorities (regarding masks, for example) has shifted; sometimes it lurches around in a single White House briefing. (Alongside the conspiracy theories, there is a realm of speculative quackery, with unproven assertions that various medicines or chemicals—or bright light, ultraviolet rays, or injected disinfectants, treatments that Trump mooted this week—can fend off or cure coronavirus.) Conspiracy theories should, in that context, be taken seriously as a symptom of underlying, often structural problems with the pandemic response.
To take another example, China has not been a model of openness with regard to the early spread of the virus. There are still questions about how SARS-CoV-2 initially took hold, such as precisely how and where it jumped from an animal, presumably a bat, to a human, and what other species might have served as intermediaries in the chain of transmission. Chinese officials also gave misleading accounts of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, and these reports served to underplay how common human-to-human transmission was. But those real failures have been exploited by President Trump, who regularly mentions them as a way to distract from his own failings. The United States is not alone in this regard: anger at China is rising in India (where the country’s Muslim minority has also been scapegoated for the virus’s spread). But it is fair to say that the center of super-spreaders in what has been an epidemic of attacks on Asian-Americans has been Washington.
Wuhan is not only where the pandemic first emerged; it is also home to a high-level virology-research lab, and that fact has inspired even more theorizing. One widely circulated notion is that China engineered SARS-CoV-2 and deliberately released it as part of a plan to bring down the world economy and increase its own power. This doesn’t make sense scientifically, since SARS-CoV-2 has the hallmarks of a virus that emerged naturally, rather than one that was engineered. The theory doesn’t even make sense on its own terms: Why would China release such a thing in its home territory first, rather than sending agents on a plane? And how could it count on the weakness of the response in other nations, including this one? (As an example of how politically and jingoistically malleable such theories are, many in China believe that the United States engineered and spread the virus, using a bicycling G.I. who attended the Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan last October, as a vector.)
The biowarfare theory has not been entertained just on the fringes. Earlier this week, Robert O’Brien, the U.S. national-security adviser, was asked about it. “Well, look, I hope it wasn’t done on purpose,” he said. “That’s not something that, that we’re propagating. But I think the point that the President’s making is that there’s a burden on China to allow folks to come in and investigate what actually happened. Did it come from a wet market? Did it come from a lab?” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed those sentiments in remarks on Wednesday, when he complained that China hadn’t given other countries full access to the Wuhan lab. Both their remarks illustrate how distrust can be used, or manipulated, as a bridge between valid questions and wild answers. It’s a dangerous game at a dangerous time.
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