COVID-19 conspiracies soar
COVID-19's origins remain hazy. Three years after the start of the pandemic, it's still unclear whether the coronavirus that causes the disease leaked from a lab or spread to humans from an animal.
This much is known: When it comes to COVID-19 misinformation, any new report on the virus' origin quickly triggers a relapse and a return of misleading claims about the virus, vaccines and masks that have reverberated since the pandemic began.
It happened again this week after the Energy Department confirmed that a classified report determined, with low confidence, that the virus escaped from a lab. Within hours, online mentions of conspiracy theories involving COVID-19 began to rise, with many commenters saying the classified report was proof they were right all along.
Far from definitive, the Energy Department's report is the latest of many attempts by scientists and officials to identify the origin of the virus, which has now killed nearly 7 million people after being first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
The report has not been made public, and officials in Washington stressed that a variety of U.S. agencies are not in agreement on the origin. On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher
Wray told Fox News that the FBI “has for quite some time now” assessed that the pandemic's origins are “most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
But others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree, and there's no consensus. Many scientists believe the likeliest explanation is that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans, possibly at Wuhan's Huanan market, a scenario backed up by multiple studies and reports. The World Health Organization has said that while an animal origin remains most likely, the possibility of a lab leak must be investigated further before it can be ruled out.
People should be openminded about the evidence used in the Energy Department's assessment, according to virologist Angela Rasmussen. But she said that without evaluating the classified report, she can't assess if it's persuasive enough to challenge the conclusion that the virus spread from an animal.
“The vast majority of the evidence continues to support natural origin,” Rasmussen told The Associated Press Wednesday. “I'm a scientist. I need to see the evidence rather than take the FBI director's word for it.”
Many of those citing the report as proof, however, seemed uninterested in the details. They seized on the report and said it suggests the experts were wrong when it came to masks and vaccines, too.