How conspiracists exploited COVID-19 science

A desire to sabotage the electoral prospects of the incumbent US president was not the only motive that conspiracists saw at work. Greed and abuse of power and trust were assumed to be at play as well. Presuppositions of self-interested collusion among actors in federal agencies, philanthropic institutions and the biopharmaceutical industry incorporate two accurate premises: they are all major funders of health science, and the pharmaceutical companies commercialize federally funded research. But what is actually going on, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the head of the anti-vaccination organization Children’s Health Defence, is more sinister: philanthropist Bill Gates pays Dr Fauci, who in turn develops drugs and passes them to drug companies in which Gates is invested. Gates then guarantees markets in Africa through his control of the World Health Organization (WHO), which requires those countries to buy the drugs and vaccines¹.

The process of generating conspiracy theories interweaves uncontested facts about ongoing activities in the government, philanthropic institutions and biopharmaceutical companies (for example, that the Gates Foundation funds vaccine development or that post-vaccination deaths have been reported to the US government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System); historical instances in which a pattern of allegedly comparable behaviour occurred (for example, that the US government authorized the 1932–1972 syphilis experiments at Tuskegee or that babies of colour were given an unlicensed vaccine in the early 1990s without their parents’ informed consent²); and pre-existing unwarranted conspiracy theories (for example, that the CDC is covering up evidence that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism). A conspiracy theory may also convert temporal associations into causal inferences (as in a since-deleted Instagram post³ claiming that Hank Aaron and Marvelous Marvin Hagler “died after taking the COVID-19 vaccine.” The COVID vaccine killed both!). “Coincidence is turning out to be quite lethal to COVID vaccine recipients”, noted Kennedy⁴.

Into this brew, conspiracists add conjecture (“maybe [the COVID-19 vaccine] doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that”⁵) and insinuations that are intended to identify a conspirator’s motive (for example, that Dr Fauci is a registered Democrat⁶, a past CEO of Moderna⁷ and a vaccine shareholder⁸). Such factors are interlaced to warrant context-specific conspiracy theories (for example, that the FDA is covering up the fact that the mRNA vaccines cause serious side effects and death⁹; or that, in league with ‘Big Pharma’, Dr Fauci mandates vaccines from which he, Big Pharma, the Gates Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg, WHO, CDC and the Chinese Communist Party benefit¹⁰).

Personal greed is one ascribed motive, and sociopathy or lust for power, glory and knowledge are others. Accordingly, one theory accuses Dr Fauci of opposing the approval of hydroxychloroquine — a drug that Trump cast as a possible “game changer”¹¹ — because Dr Fauci wanted the virus to spread until a vaccine could be developed and named after him¹². On another front, by terming the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist the ‘father of the virus’, conspiracists assumed the motive explored in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — an arrogant search for knowledge unmindful of the risks or consequences. The meme ‘Fauci Lied. Millions Died’¹³ capsulizes the conspiracy assertion that by denying that a US$600,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) subaward from EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology¹⁴ involved gain-of-function research, Dr Fauci and compatriots such as NIH director Dr Francis Collins are covering up (that is, ‘Fauci Lied’) the supposed reality that the resulting explorations created SARS-CoV-2 and with it the pandemic (that is, ‘Millions Died’).

Here, conspiracists are exploiting uncertainty about the genesis of SARS-CoV-2. As the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine noted in a statement on 15 June 2021, “The origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and the circumstances of the first cases of human infection, remain unknown”. Whether intended as parody or not, former Daily Show host Jon Stewart reinforced the broader inference when, appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on 14 June 2021, he told the host Stephen Colbert, “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic — which was more than likely caused by science”.

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