Who ‘Created' Covid?

Was the Moon landing fake? Do reptiles rule us? Is Elvis alive? When conspiracy theories start proliferating like mutant viruses…

- Kajal Basu

Like a single COVID-19 virus playing Chinese whispers—and making a million bad xerox copies of itself—the conspiracy theories took no time at all taking off after China announced its animal-to-human vector in mid-January. In a week, stories about the involvement of Bill Gates began circulating until he turned into what a Syracuse University professor called “a sort of abstract bogeyman” for conspiracists. Multi-billionaire investor George Soros, a thorn in both US president Donald Trump and Chinese premier Xi Jinping’s side, was targeted swiftly after Gates (but never—because he does not fund antiviral research—with an equal ferocity). It isn’t entirely transparent as yet how anyone would stand to gain from a deadly pandemic that’s pretty much an equal-opportunity offender for all countries, if not in the number of people culled, then in the devastation of economies. But the idea lives.

The galaxy of conspiracy theories spinning around the neocoronavirus was birthed by a complex network of rightwing doomsayers in internet watering holes for paradigm questioners such as 4chan, QAnon, QClearance, 8chan, 2 Staqe 2, Zero Hedge and InfoWars. And these are umbrellas that shelter under them a joyous jambalaya of conspiracists from ideologies that range from the Alt Right to anarchocapitalists to the radical Far Left, some of these opposites getting their feed from the very same disseminators. Farleft conspiracists quote the far-right Zero Hedge, and are often found on Reddit mixing it up with QAnonists, who insist that Trump was made president by the US military to save the country from a ring of paedophilic Satanists, which includes the eponymous Mr Gates.