John Bodner - COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories

The Covid-19 pandemic hovered over New York City for months before descending with a sudden, sickening crash in the second week of March. As the caseload ticked up42 people, then 95, then a dawning, dizzying realization it wasnt going to slow down any time soonthe mayor declared a state of emergency. The governor placed a ban on gatherings over 500 people. The quiet, edgy sense of rising panic could be felt in the streets, the grocery stores, the suddenly anxiety-provoking subway.

And then the fake text messages started to flood in, forwarded from people supposedly in the know.

A friend just alerted me, one read, that her friend who works in the emergency management team at the NYPD plans to put containment actions in place this weekend. The text went on to claim that the subways would be partially shut down, all non-emergency vehicles would be banned from the road, and that everyone needed to stock up on cash and food: Groceries and ATM machines will have limited ability to be refilled. Another widely circulated, entirely fake missive claimed to be from a personal friend of the former mayors daughtera wealthy, connected person, the subtext wentwho was said to also be preparing for a coming emergency shutdown of the city.

More messages started to circulate nationally: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would institute a nationwide lockdown. Friends of friends who worked at the CIA and the renowned Cleveland Clinic made similarly dire warnings.

They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to help prevent looters and rioters, one message read, supposedly from a friend working at DHS. He said he got the call last night and was told to pack and be prepared for the call today with his dispatch orders.

The texts were all fake, of course, and their most dire predictions were untrue, but they worked. They sowed panic, and they were spread by people who knew better. As I sat in New York, anxiously checking my phone, I began to get them too.

I lived in New York City for seven years before moving to Los Angeles, but I was back that horrible week in March for a work trip. It was a fitting, and awful, place to watch as our lives began to change for what would prove to be a very long time. And as I started to get obviously bogus messages about the NYPDs emergency management teamnot a real entityI worried, for the first time, about how intimately misinformation would affect the people I loved during this pandemic. I packed my bags and flew home, several days early, on an entirely full, dead silent plane, full of equally panicked people. I havent been able to return to New York since.

The text messages were debunked, but the story soon had a new wrinkle: U.S. intelligence agents, speaking anonymously to the New York Times , said in April that they believed some of the messages were amplified by Chinese operatives seeking to sow panic and division in the United States. The veracity of that information, too, was hard to parse; citing national security, the intelligence agents didnt provide detailed evidence.

In all, that time was a perfect, and perfectly chilling, premonition and capsule demonstration of how conspiracy theories, misinformation and terrifying rumors would come to embody the coronavirus pandemic era. As I write this six months later, the world is still gripped by the pandemic, and by the various kinds of twisted, misleading and extremely harmful narratives birthed or given new life by this terrible moment. Claims that coronavirus is fake or a bioweapon engineered to kill millions of people have circulated globally; chapters two and four cover several of these and the context that spawned them. Bogus health products like Miracle Mineral Supplementa longtime faux miracle cure for many ailments that is, in reality, just bleachhave been promoted as a coronavirus cure. (To make matters worse, the president of the United States casually suggested ingesting disinfectants as a possible Covid cure.) Doubts about a coronavirus vaccine have been effectively sown before one is even available, as you will see in chapter five. And, like never before, were having a global discussion about conspiracy theories: where they come from, how they travel, and how they distort the ways we see the world.

Conspiracy theories, in the most fundamental sense, seek to explain upsetting events by identifying a supposed secret group of evildoers who must be opposed in order to bring the world back into a state of calm and order. As the authors of this book note, conspiracy theories can take on a shape similar to myth: a set of outsized but recognizable shapes that help simplifyand, more often than not, dangerously oversimplifya complicated time.

Six months in, the mythology around Covid-19 isnt quite set. The ground is still shifting and fertile. And so opportunists are busy trying to plant seeds that they hope will grow into something favorable for them.

The fake texts were among the first wave of attempts at conspiracy theory narrative about the virus. They also identified a key theme: the idea that world governments would use the pandemic to impose new and frightening amounts of control on its citizenry. (In fact, in a bitter irony, the National Guard was deployed during the Covid-19 pandemic, but not because of it. Instead, the Federal government used the Guard to try to quell widespread protests that arose after the murder by police officers of George Floyd in Minneapolis.) Read all about the New World Order in chapter six.