Why Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Flourish. And Why It Matters.

Volunteers disinfecting a theater in Wuhan, China, last week.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters
Volunteers disinfecting a theater in Wuhan, China, last week.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters
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Why Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Flourish. And Why It Matters.

Volunteers disinfecting a theater in Wuhan, China, last week.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters
Volunteers disinfecting a theater in Wuhan, China, last week.Credit...Aly Song/Reuters

The coronavirus has given rise to a flood of conspiracy theories, disinformation and propaganda, eroding public trust and undermining health officials in ways that could elongate and even outlast the pandemic.

Claims that the virus is a foreign bioweapon, a partisan invention or part of a plot to re-engineer the population have replaced a mindless virus with more familiar, comprehensible villains. Each claim seems to give a senseless tragedy some degree of meaning, however dark.

Rumors of secret cures — diluted bleach, turning off your electronics, bananas — promise hope of protection from a threat that not even world leaders can escape.

The belief that one is privy to forbidden knowledge offers feelings of certainty and control amid a crisis that has turned the world upside down. And sharing that “knowledge” may give people something that is hard to come by after weeks of lockdowns and death: a sense of agency.

“It has all the ingredients for leading people to conspiracy theories,” said Karen M. Douglas, a social psychologist who studies belief in conspiracies at the University of Kent in Britain.

Rumors and patently unbelievable claims are spread by everyday people whose critical faculties have simply been overwhelmed, psychologists say, by feelings of confusion and helplessness.

But many false claims are also being promoted by governments looking to hide their failures, partisan actors seeking political benefit, run-of-the-mill scammers and, in the United States, a president who has pushed unproven cures and blame-deflecting falsehoods.

The conspiracy theories all carry a common message: The only protection comes from possessing the secret truths that “they” don’t want you to hear.

The feelings of security and control offered by such rumors may be illusory, but the damage to the public trust is all too real.

It has led people to consume fatal home remedies and flout social distancing guidance. And it is disrupting the sweeping collective actions, like staying at home or wearing masks, needed to contain a virus that has already killed more than 79,000 people.

“We’ve faced pandemics before,” said Graham Brookie, who directs the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “We haven’t faced a pandemic at a time when humans are as connected and have as much access to information as they do now.”

This growing ecosystem of misinformation and public distrust has led the World Health Organization to warn of an “infodemic.”

“You see the space being flooded,” Mr. Brookie said, adding, “The anxiety is viral, and we’re all just feeling that at scale.”

The Allure of ‘Secret Knowledge’
“People are drawn to conspiracies because they promise to satisfy certain psychological motives that are important to people,” Dr. Douglas said. Chief among them: command of the facts, autonomy over one’s well-being and a sense of control.

If the truth does not fill those needs, we humans have an incredible capacity to invent stories that will, even when some part of us knows they are false. A recent study found that people are significantly likelier to share false coronavirus information than they are to believe it.

“The magnitude of misinformation spreading in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic is overwhelming our small team,” Snopes, a fact-checking site, said on Twitter. “We’re seeing scores of people, in a rush to find any comfort, make things worse as they share (sometimes dangerous) misinformation.”

Widely shared, Instagram posts falsely suggested that the coronavirus was planned by Bill Gates on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. In Alabama, Facebook posts falsely claimed that shadowy powers had ordered sick patients to be secretly helicoptered into the state. In Latin America, equally baseless rumors have proliferated that the virus was engineered to spread H.I.V. In Iran, pro-government voices portray the disease as a Western plot.

If the claims are seen as taboo, all the better.

The belief that we have access to secret information may help us feel that we have an advantage, that we are somehow safer. “If you believe in conspiracy theories, then you have power through knowledge that other people don’t have,” Dr. Douglas said.

Italian media buzzed over a video posted by an Italian man from Tokyo in which he claimed that the coronavirus was treatable but that Italian officials were “hiding the truth.”

Other videos, popular on YouTube, claim that the entire pandemic is a fiction staged to control the population.

Still others say that the disease is real, but its cause isn’t a virus — it’s 5G cellular networks.

One YouTube video pushing this falsehood, and implying that social distancing measures could be ignored, has received 1.9 million views. In Britain, there has been a rash of attacks on cellular towers.

Conspiracy theories may also make people feel less alone. Few things tighten the bonds of “us” like rallying against “them,” especially foreigners and minorities, both frequent scapegoats of coronavirus rumors and much else before now.

But whatever comfort that affords is short-lived.

Over time, research finds, trading in conspiracies not only fails to satisfy our psychological needs, Dr. Douglas said, but also tends to worsen feelings of fear or helplessness.

And that can lead us to seek out still more extreme explanations, like addicts looking for bigger and bigger hits.

Governments Find Opportunity in Confusion
The homegrown conspiracists and doubters are finding themselves joined by governments. Anticipating political backlash from the crisis, government leaders have moved quickly to shunt the blame by trafficking in false claims of their own.

A senior Chinese official pushed claims that the virus was introduced to China by members of the United States Army, an accusation that was allowed to flourish on China’s tightly controlled social media.

In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro suggested that the virus was an American bioweapon aimed at China. In Iran, officials called it a plot to suppress the vote there. And outlets that back the Russian government, including branches in Western Europe, have promoted claims that the United States engineered the virus to undermine China’s economy.

In the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, leaders praised bogus treatments and argued that citizens should continue working.

But officials have hardly refrained from the rumor mongering in more democratic nations, particularly those where distrust of authority has given rise to strong populist movements.

Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s anti-migrant League Party, wrote on Twitter that China had devised a “lung supervirus” from “bats and rats.”

And President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has repeatedly promoted unproven coronavirus treatments, and implied that the virus is less dangerous than experts say. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all took the extraordinary step of removing the posts.

President Trump, too, has repeatedly pushed unproven drugs, despite warnings from scientists and despite at least one fatal overdose of a man whose wife said he had taken a drug at Mr. Trump’s suggestion.

Mr. Trump has accused perceived enemies of seeking to “inflame” the coronavirus “situation” to hurt him. When supplies of personal protective equipment fell short at New York hospitals, he implied that health workers might be stealing masks.

His allies have gone further.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, and others have suggested that the virus may have been produced by a Chinese weapons lab. Some media allies have claimed that the death toll has been inflated by Mr. Trump’s enemies.

A Parallel Crisis
“This kind of information suppression is dangerous — really, really dangerous,” Mr. Brookie said, referring to Chinese and American efforts to play down the threat of the outbreak.

It has nourished not just individual conspiracies but a wider sense that official sources and data cannot be trusted, and a growing belief that people must find the truth on their own.

A cacophony arising from armchair epidemiologists who often win attention through sensational claims is at times crowding out legitimate experts whose answers are rarely as tidy or emotionally reassuring.

They promise easy cures, like avoiding telecommunications or even eating bananas. They wave off the burdens of social isolation as unnecessary. Some sell sham treatments of their own.

“Medical conspiracy theories have the power to increase distrust in medical authorities, which can impact people’s willingness to protect themselves,” Daniel Jolley and Pia Lamberty, scholars of psychology, wrote in a recent article.

Such claims have been shown to make people less likely to take vaccines or antibiotics, and more likely to seek medical advice from friends and family instead of from doctors.

Belief in one conspiracy also tends to increase belief in others. The consequences, experts warn, could not only worsen the pandemic, but outlive it.

Medical conspiracies have been a growing problem for years. So has distrust of authority, a major driver of the world’s slide into fringe populism. Now, as the world enters an economic crisis with little modern precedent, that may deepen.

The wave of coronavirus conspiracies, Dr. Jolley and Dr. Lamberty wrote, “has the potential to be just as dangerous for societies as the outbreak itself.”

(The New York Times)



What to Know About Zelenskyy’s Meeting with Trump

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP)
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP)
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What to Know About Zelenskyy’s Meeting with Trump

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP)
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a media conference at EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP)

US President Donald Trump is set to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders at the White House on Monday to discuss how to end Russia's three-year war in Ukraine.

Months of US-led diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting haven’t made headway, but the stakes have risen since Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday. After that summit, Trump abandoned the requirement of reaching a ceasefire in order to hold further talks and aligned with Putin's position that negotiations should focus on a long-term settlement instead.

The presence of several European leaders at the talks in Washington shows how central the conflict — and any settlement — is to wider security questions on the continent.

They are looking to safeguard Ukraine and Europe more broadly from any further aggression from Moscow, but also are providing a show of support for Zelenskyy after his last visit to the White House led to an angry confrontation. The American and Ukrainian leaders are scheduled to first meet privately, without the Europeans.

On “Trump’s ultimate policy towards the Russia-Ukraine war hangs not just the future of Ukraine security, but Europe’s as well,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The stakes could not be higher for the continent.’’

Here’s what to know about the Washington meeting.

The talks could be a pivotal moment in the war After meeting Putin in Alaska, Trump is making a big push for a breakthrough.

A lot of issues need to be resolved, however, and the two sides have previously established red lines that are incompatible, including questions of whether Ukraine will cede any land to Russia, the future of Ukraine's army and whether the country will have any guarantee against further Russian aggression.

In a post on social media Sunday night, Trump appeared to shift the burden for ending the war to Zelenskyy, whose country was invaded in February 2022.

“President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” he wrote.

A comprehensive peace deal could still be a long way off.

Putin wants the Donbas As a condition for peace, the Russian leader wants Kyiv to give up the Donbas, the industrial region in eastern Ukraine that has seen some of the most intense fighting but that Russian forces have failed to capture completely.

In his Sunday night post, Trump wrote that Zelenskyy should also accept Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

As part of a deal, Putin has said the United States and its European allies can provide Ukraine with a security guarantee resembling NATO’s collective defense pledge, according to a senior US official.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called that a “game-changing” step though he offered few details on how it would work.

Ukraine has long pressed for some kind of guarantee that would prevent Russia from invading again.

Ukraine won’t surrender land to Russia Zelenskyy has rejected Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender the Donbas region, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, since the Ukrainian Constitution forbids giving up territory or trading land. That also means he can't cede Crimea either.

Instead, freezing the front line, which snakes roughly 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from northeastern to southeastern Ukraine, seems to be the most the Ukrainian people might accept.

Russia currently holds about 20% of Ukrainian territory.

Europe’s security is also at stake European leaders see Ukraine’s fight as a bulwark against any Kremlin ambitions to threaten other countries in eastern Europe and beyond.

French President Emmanuel Macron described Ukraine as an “outpost of our collective defense if Russia wanted to advance again.”

“If we are weak with Russia today, we’ll be preparing the conflicts of tomorrow and they will impact the Ukrainians and — make no mistake — they can impact us, too.” Macron said Sunday.

The European political heavyweights expected in Washington are Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

Civilians are killed as the fighting continues Ukraine has in recent months been losing more territory against Russia’s bigger army, and Moscow’s forces breached Ukrainian lines in a series of minor infiltrations in the Donetsk region ahead of the Alaska summit. But there is no sign of a looming, major Russian breakthrough on the front line.

Both sides have also kept up their daily long-range strikes behind the front line.

A Russian drone strike on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, killed six people late Sunday, including an 18-month-old and a 16-year-old, according to regional head Oleh Syniehubov. The attack on the northeastern city injured 20 others, including six children, he said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Monday reported intercepting 23 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions and the annexed Crimean peninsula overnight.