However, the sheer coincidence of China’s lead institute studying bat coronaviruses being in the same city as the origin of the COVID outbreak has proven too juicy for conspiracists to resist. She admits breathing a “sigh of relief” when genetic sequencing showed that the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus did not match any of the viruses sampled and studied in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by her team. One of these researchers, Shi Zhengli, a prominent virologist who spent years collecting bat dung samples in caves and was a lead expert on the earlier SARS outbreak, was sufficiently concerned about the prospect that she spent days frantically checking lab records to see if anything had gone wrong. It is true that the original epicenter of the epidemic, the Chinese city of Wuhan, also hosts a virology institute where researchers have been studying bat coronaviruses for a long time. This one at least has the benefit of being plausible. (The Cornell Alliance for Science is partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) The virus escaped from a Chinese lab
The spread of misinformation has meant that ID2020, a small non-profit that focuses on establishing digital IDs for poorer people around the world, has had to call in the FBI. Instead some have spread the myth that Gates wants to use a vaccination program to implant digital microchips that will somehow track and control people. But anti-vaxxers don’t believe vaccines work. There is some truth in this, of course: vaccinating much of the world’s population may well be the only way to avoid an eventual death toll in the tens of millions. According to the New York Times, anti-vaxxers, members of QAnon and right-wing pundits have seized on a video of a 2015 Ted talk given by Gates - where he discussed the Ebola outbreak and warned of a new pandemic - to bolster their claims he had foreknowledge of the COVID pandemic or even purposely caused it.Ī recent variant of this conspiracy theory, particularly beloved by anti-vaccination activists, is the idea that COVID is part of a dastardly Gates-led plot to vaccinate the world’s population.
Many of these plots and subplots seem to involve Bill Gates, who became a new target of disinformation after gently criticizing the defunding of the World Health Organization. Most conspiracy theories, like the viruses they resemble, constantly mutate and have several variants circulating at any one time. Even so, this conspiracy theory - after being spread by celebrities with big social media followings - has led to cellphone towers being set on fire in the UK and elsewhere. It’s worth repeating, as the World Health Organization (WHO) points out, that viruses cannot travel on mobile networks, and that COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in many countries that do not have 5G networks. Cue a viral meme linking the two, avidly promoted by anti-vaccine activists who have long been spreading fears about electromagnetic radiation, egged on by the Kremlin. But that isn’t really the point - conspiracy theories are enticing because they often link two things which at first might appear be correlated in this case, the rapid rollout of 5G networks was taking place at the same time the pandemic hit. The latter are waves/photons, while the former are biological particles composed of proteins and nucleic acids. This conspiracy theory should be easy to debunk: it is biologically impossible for viruses to spread using the electromagnetic spectrum. Here are the top 10 conspiracy theories making the rounds. Conspiracy theories that behave like viruses themselves are spreading just as rapidly online as SARS-CoV-2 does offline. Each citation lists: title, manuscript number, and whether it is available in German, English, or at OCMH.As the COVID-19 crisis worsens, the world also faces a global misinformation pandemic. Manuscripts were written by German officers about their wartime experiences. Catalogs were published which list the titles of manuscripts by topical subject compiled as part of the Foreign Military Studies Program after World War II. They are not available online, and the Cornell Library has very few of them. W92 volumes held: 1-15 v.19-24)Ī similar collection is Foreign Military Studies, produced by the Historical Division at the Headquarters of the European Command immediately after the War. Burdick and Jürgen Rohwer, associate editors. World War II German military studies: a collection of 213 special reports on the Second World War prepared by former officers of the Wehrmacht for the United States Army / Donald S. This is a nice collection of 24 volumes of material, partly in English translation.
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