We all became epidemiologists, and now we’re all becoming virology genomic experts.
17 June 2021 – So Joe Biden has asked the U.S. intelligence agencies for information that “could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” on whether COVID-19 “emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident” at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. And I get it. Biden’s idea is likely that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But as many pundits have noted, decoupling the serious questions of grown-ups from bad-but-viral content may be harder than he hopes. Questions about the safety record of the lab in Wuhan have been muddled with conspiratorial views from the beginning.
No one disputes that many questions remain unanswered about the emergence and rapid spread of COVID-19. While Biden’s order seeks to answer only whether the lab was involved in an accident, reasoned questions don’t make the internet go ‘round: unreasoned suspicion and sensation do.
The problem is that these legitimate questions capture attention by surfing on a mountainous wave of Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theories. Matthew Knott summarised all those issues very well here. Much of this conspiracy content intertwines with the more reasoned questions. The strange life-cycle that results sees Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theories confer a patina of legitimacy on themselves through this parasitic relationship with legitimate inquiry. This pulls yet more attention in a sensationalist direction, yielding more articles, posts and commentary containing the apparent logic: ‘it could be true, so it must be true.’ If there is any doubt, the rising web traffic provides justification. In the process, the real and frankly unreal questions blend together in a haze of unlimited algorithmic interest. Molly Grew framed it this way:
After Biden’s announcement, it’s impossible to decouple legitimate inquiry from conspiracy. Any attempt to address those lingering questions just inflates the fantastical parts that can almost never be disproved.
It’s the Benghazi effect — but for much of the global public.
In this instance, though, Biden risks losing control of his own agenda on China. Rather than discuss human rights in Xinjiang or the economic future of Americans or US posture in the Pacific, he has brought future Wuhan lab leak talk inside the halls of power, where questions of whether or not he is “ignoring” those conspiracies that cannot easily be disproven can undermine the rest of what he hopes to achieve.
Since it became clear a pandemic was under way that would significantly disrupt the world, conspiracy theories have been everywhere. Some of the usual suspects leaned heavily on standard conspiracy: China tried to blame the US, Russia blamed the US, so did Iran, and frequently these rehashed older conspiracies about US-made bioweapons. Then-President Trump and other members of his administration blamed China for the “China virus,” as Trump so eloquently called it, helping fuel a rash of anti-Asian sentiment at home.
But then there were other conspiracy theories. The idea that COVID-19 began as a Chinese bioweapon looms in the background. So are conspiracies about Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates intentionally creating the virus for a variety of diabolical world domination plots. It gets darker and more convoluted the deeper you go, connecting efficiently to other conspiracy subgenres.
So despite more recent expressions of doubt by some virologists and the accompanying calls for a renewed investigation of the lab leak theory, it’s hard to ignore that the theory’s loudest champions and amplifiers have long been the likes of the Trump White House, Fox News, Epoch Times, Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui’s GNews, other Murdoch media, and Republicans in search of causes to coalesce around — including, more recently, subjects to attack the new administration on.
And this is how we have arrived at this moment, where every major news outlet is running pieces questioning whether the “lab leak theory” has been ignored — not because there is any new evidence, but simply because it is being engaged more online in this broader conspiracy universe.
It’s unclear that the US intelligence community will be able to offer anything decisive on the matter of what role, if any, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had in the creation or emergence of COVID-19. Conclusive answers will be hard to come by this far after the events they hope to explore. The White House has noted that two major intelligence agencies favor the natural emergence explanation, while one favors the lab accident explanation — though in all three cases, they rate this analysis with “low confidence.” This indicates that the information currently available is vague or unverifiable. And as several allied intelligence heads have said, at this point, it’s likely that much of the potential evidence has been destroyed.
In my year-and-one-half of researching and writing about the pandemic I collected numerous pieces about the lab theory. Since the start of 2020, the dynamo of fear and suspicion has been so strong that we seem to forget that many articles discussing the SARS and MERS outbreaks routinely ended with warnings from experts that humanity was overdue for a pandemic. But with 175 million infected and 3.5 million dead globally, emotion has steamrolled reason.
In our global commons, the idea that a more nefarious explanation must exist to explain the strange events of the past year expands like architectural creations on Minecraft: the structures take shape almost effortlessly, filling the public’s view. One logically flawed suspicion — “China was creating a bioweapon” — serves as a foundation to another equally large flawed structure — say, that the National Institutes of Health under Anthony Fauci purposely funded the virus’ creation, which has been a popular conspiracy theory from the earliest days of the pandemic.
The endless expanse of the internet can be filled with endless content, integrating the latest information as it goes.
After more than a year of rightwing partisans hammering away at this suspicion, at least in part as a punishment for Fauci’s public questioning of Trump’s actions and statements on the pandemic, Biden directing the US intelligence community to explore the question of the lab won’t tamp down the other chatter. Anticipation of the report will only fuel discussion, and the absence of answers to conspiracies will be seen as evidence itself. The process will consume valuable White House attention and energy. The entire quest for answers is framed by what, for the foreseeable future, are non-disprovable theories.
Nonetheless, this process and the inescapable shadow of undisprovable theories can eventually affect the real-world options for Biden. For example, what happened in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 was never an insider plan by the Clinton-led State Department to kill American diplomats — yet the endless hearings and investigations amplified this as a go-to topic in the conspiratorial rightwing media, as well as more mainstream news. It’s just as likely now that “Benghazi” elicits thoughts of the conspiracy as thoughts of the actual event.
The Wuhan lab probe is already having a similar Benghazi effect. The conspiracies that won’t be answered — because they are not being explored — will gain prominence, accompanied by the usual claims that the real questions are being ignored. Since Biden’s announcement, for example, the cadre of conspiracy amplifiers, many of whom themselves muddle what questions they are seeking to answer about the lab, have used the investigation to attack the credibility of the media and experts who weren’t discussing it before.
The facts won’t change. They’re still scant. What will change is the feelings around the facts, the social acceptance of them, the sort of sentiment that can be altered through a conscious effort of messaging — and the amplification of that message in our feeds by the algorithms picking up on all this active noise.
Team Biden must be cautious not to be ingested by an issue they cannot influence: the almost non-disprovable suspicion that the Wuhan Lab birthed the pandemic, and all the tentacles that come with it. Ronald Reagan’s principle that “if you are explaining, you are losing” still holds true. The question is: in three months will China be explaining itself on the pandemic’s origins? Or will Biden be explaining himself on China?
There are only so many minutes in the attention economy of a presidency.