Biosecurity

Where the Coronavirus Bioweapon Conspiracy Theories Really Come From

Diseases bring out the worst in us, inspiring racist attacks, xenophobic public policy, and isolationism. It’s happening right now in the world of coronavirus disease 2019, formally called COVID-19. But diseases also bring out the worst of us, grifters and promoters who thrive on the spread of conspiracies and the panic they cause. There’s one particularly pernicious conspiracy I want to address, one that also cropped up during the 2013–16 Ebola virus disease outbreak originating in Western Africa.

I’m talking about bioweapons. Whenever a disease emerges, claims that it has spread too quickly to be natural soon follow.

Conspiracy theories infect us faster than the virus itself, it seems. This time, the basic idea behind all of them is that the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is suspicious. From there, some claim that it escaped the lab accidentally after being used in a regular, if risky, experiment, or a bioweapons program. Others suggest it was released intentionally, though it gets convoluted when you try to determine who, exactly, was being attacked: As the podcast Knowledge Fight  has documented, Alex Jones has said that COVID-19 is both a false-flag style attack by the Chinese government against its own people and a “ChiCom” (that is, Chinese communist) plot to attack the West, a conspiracy repeated by Rush Limbaugh.