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WASHINGTON, March 1 (AP) — The origins of COVID-19 remain murky. Three years after the start of the pandemic, it’s still unclear whether the coronavirus that causes the disease escaped from a lab or jumped from animals to humans.
We know it: When it comes to COVID-19 misinformation, any new reports of the virus’s origins can quickly spark a resurgence of the misleading claims about the virus, vaccines and masks that have reverberated since the pandemic began.
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That happened again this week after the Energy Department confirmed a classified report that determined the virus had leaked from a lab.
Within hours, online mentions of conspiracy theories involving COVID-19 began to rise, with many commenters saying the confidential report proved they had been right all along.
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The Energy Department report, far from definitive, is the latest in multiple attempts by scientists and officials to pinpoint the source of the virus. The virus has now killed nearly seven million people after it was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
The report has not been made public, and officials in Washington have stressed that U.S. agencies have not agreed on the source.
On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News that the FBI had assessed “for some time” that the origin of the pandemic was “likely a potential laboratory event in Wuhan.”
But others in the U.S. intelligence community disagree, and there is no consensus. The most likely explanation, according to many scientists, is that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 may have jumped from animals to humans at the Huanan market in Wuhan, a scenario supported by multiple studies and reports.
The World Health Organization said that while an animal source was still very likely, further investigation was necessary before a laboratory leak could be ruled out.
Virologist Angela Rasmussen said people should be open to the evidence used in the DOE’s assessment.
But she said there was no reason to question the conclusion of natural transmission of the virus without evaluating the evidence contained in the classified report.
“We can and do know what the scientific evidence shows,” Rasmussen tweeted Tuesday. “Existing evidence still points to the presence of zoonotic diseases in the South China market.”
However, many of those who cited the report as evidence seemed uninterested in the evidence. They seized on the report as a sign that experts were also wrong about masks and vaccines.
“Closing schools is a catastrophically failed policy. Masks are ineffective. And harmful,” said a tweet that has been read nearly 300,000 times since Sunday.
“Coronavirus came from a lab. Everything we skeptics say is true.”
Overall mentions of COVID-19 started to rise after the Wall Street Journal published a story about the Energy Department report on Sunday.
Since then, mentions of various COVID-related conspiracy theories have skyrocketed, according to an analysis conducted by San Francisco-based media intelligence firm Zignal Labs and shared with The Associated Press.
While the lab leak theory has been widely circulated on the Internet since the start of the pandemic, citations to the Energy Department report soared by 100,000 in the 48 hours after it was released, according to an analysis by Zignal via social media, blogs and other sites %.
Many conspiracy theories contradict the findings in the DOE report.
In a tweet on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, called COVID-19 a “man-made biological weapon from China.”
One follower quickly challenged her: “It’s made in Ukraine,” he replied.
Brett Schaefer, a senior research fellow at the institute, said that because so many questions remain about a world event that has claimed so many lives and upended many more, it is also important that COVID-19 is still able to generate so much anger and misinformation. No wonder. Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington-based organization that tracks government propaganda about COVID-19.
“The pandemic has been incredibly disruptive to everyone. The strong feelings about COVID, I don’t think that’s going to go away,” Schaeffer said.
“Every time something new comes along, it breathes new life into these real or imagined grievances and frustrations.”
Chinese government officials have used their social media accounts in the past to amplify anti-American conspiracy theories, including some suggesting that the United States created the COVID-19 virus and released it in China.
So far, they have taken a quieter approach to the DOE report. In an official response, the Chinese government dismissed the agency’s assessment as an effort to politicize the pandemic.
Online, Beijing’s sprawling propaganda and disinformation network remained largely silent, with only a few posts criticizing or mocking the report.
“BREAKING,” one pro-China YouTuber wrote on Twitter.
“I can now declare with some certainty that the coronavirus pandemic began with the leak of Hunter Biden’s laptop.” (AP)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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