COVID-19 origins conspiracy theories: Background

I’m exploring the development of conspiracy theories relating to the origins of COVID-19 and plan to write up my notes (time permitting). I will refer to events occurring before the pandemic, so I’m going to set the stage by reviewing some of the relevant events that preceded the pandemic, and try to remember what we knew when the pandemic began. (Image credit: CFR review of 2019)

• 2002: SARS outbreak begins in Guangdong, China. The first cases occur in November 2002, but the outbreak only becomes apparent in January 2003, then disorganization and politicization delayed an effective response for additional months. The zoonotic origin of SARS was uncovered over the next year. Masked palm civets were suspected as the source of zoonotic infections starting in May 2003, leading to a brief ban during the summer of 2003, followed by another round of zoonotic infections in December 2003 and January 2004. Authorities then restricted the civet trade and cull farmed herds, but the ban on civet farming was lifted before long. Researchers at WIV later demonstrated that SARS-CoV-like viruses among horseshoe bats in Yunnan are able to invade mammalian cells expressing ACE receptor proteins from bats, civet, or humans.
• 2011: Donald Trump begins pushing the Birther conspiracy theory.
• 2011: Osama Bin Laden is killed in Pakistan, producing a backlash against vaccination campaigns due to CIA infiltration of those programs in their search for Bin Laden.
• 2012: First MERS outbreak occurs in Saudi Arabia. MERS outbreaks occur repeatedly due to zoonotic acquisitions from camels. Most outbreaks remain local, but one spreads internationally to cause a large outbreak in South Korea in 2015.
• 2012: a unknown respiratory disease affects 4 miners in Yunnan. Their work site (a mine shaft with bats roosting) was later investigated by WIV team and coronavirus sequences were identified among bats, which were published in 2016. (this includes viruses that are somewhat similar to SARS-CoV-2, but these coronaviruses were not the cause of the miners’ illnesses)
• 2012: Xi Jinping becomes General Secretary of the CCP (and President of PRC in 2013). His ascension is followed by a purge of other party leaders using corruption accusations, and increased censorship. He also instigates greater confrontation with foreign countries, including increased stoking of official conspiracy theories, and mounting demands to self-censor as the price of doing business with China.
• 2013: West Africa Ebola outbreak (a few cases in USA in 2014) — Conspiracy theories about the origin of the outbreak spread in West Africa. Donald Trump calls to ban American doctors from returning to the USA for treatment, dismissing medical community assurances that we have proper hospital and sanitation facilities to prevent outbreaks here.
• 2014: US pauses funding of “gain of function” research while it establishes policies to govern it.
• 2015: Zika virus spreads throughout Latin America, prompting its own wave of conspiracy theories.
• 2017: Donald Trump becomes President on an anti-immigrant and anti-China platform, bringing a paranoid distrust of “the deep state” with him and repeatedly interfering in the work of government scientists.
• 2017: The US department of Health and Human Services establishes guidelines for funding research involving “enhanced Pandemic Potential Pathogens”, lifting the 2014 pause on ‘gain of function’ research.
• 2018: Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) begins using is BSL-4 laboratory. WIV proposes to continue sampling bats in Yunnan caves and testing the ability of their spike proteins to facilitate human infections as part of the unfunded DARPA “DEFUSE” proposal led by EcoHealth Alliance. WIV also acted as a subcontractor on a NIH-funded EcoHealth Alliance grant, started in 2014.

As of 2019, many researchers in China are producing information about coronaviruses. The WIV published a review of the geographic structure of SARS-related coronaviruses in China, and reported bat-coronavirus antibodies among some villagers living near caves where coronaviruses circulate among the bats. In addition to WIV in Wuhan, productive coronavirus research groups operated of Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong (and probably other locations I’m not aware of).

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories were thriving in USA: QAnon, ‘Crisis Actors’, replacement theory, wildfires caused by Rothchilds, unfounded accusations of voting fraud, WEC, 9/11 Truther, and so on. China has it’s own conspiracy theory culture, that I’m not able to describe.

In future diaries (time permitting), I plan to track the development of the ‘COVID-19 origin’ conspiracy theories and the mainstreaming of their conclusions. Notably, these are not as outlandish and obviously implausible as many of the traditional ‘fringe’ conspiracy theories in the US. They are more like “stop the steal” in how they dig up or manufacture a huge number of red flags, then jump to the conclusion of guilty behavior based on nothing more than their own distrust of certain people. The theories are pushed by professional propaganda networks to attack perceived opponents; they use this ‘flood of shit’ to keep pressure on their target — whether in pursuit of the relatively noble goal of imposing greater biosafety regulations on researchers or, or in the more dangerous pursuit of greater political power by raising fears of a malevolent ‘deep state’.

To be absolutely clear, the problem with ‘conspiracy theories’ is not the conclusion that is reached, or that a person has a mistaken understanding of the world based on what they’ve heard from others. The problem comes from people making unfounded accusations against others; these accusations become conspiracy theories when they are layered on top of each other so that the small accusations support the large accusations, particularly when the small accusations are either unfounded in themselves or have no connection to the large accusations. Popular conspiracy theories are particularly insidious in this way, where the sheer volume of small accusations makes it difficult to refute or investigate all of them, particularly if they don’t seem too important — but the theorist will later rely on that “common knowledge” as a foundation for their larger accusations.  A common theme in these conspiracy theories is that when the theorist is confronted with the absence of evidence for their claims, they appeal to a ‘cover up’, calling for endless investigations of whomever they are targeting. They likewise interpret mundane activities as having sinister motives, which can’t be disproved, and demands that the targeted people spend all of their time addressing these unfounded accusations.

If you are interested in some reading, below are a few essays putting forth ideas that I think are relevant to understanding conspiracy theories.

• Hannah Arendt Meets QAnon: Conspiracy, Ideology, and the Collapse of Common Sense: I have not read the entire essay, but I have read Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, and this seems like a more readable examination of some of the main ideas about conspiracy theories.
• “Chaos Theory on the Billiard Table”: Conspiracy theorists often act as though the world is much more predictable than it really is — affecting both their own confidence in ideas built from fragmentary information and their willingness to imagine criminal masterminds with globe-spanning powers. This could be part of ‘the loss of common sense’ described in the above essay. I’ve long felt that Chaos theory provides a good antidote to this tendency.
• The general idiocy that’s out there.

My poll question below is a repeat of this YouGov/Economist survey from March 2023: