Insidious Vectors of Disease: Legacies of Conspiracy, Misinformation, Distrust in the Propagation of Infectious Disease.
An Examination of Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19

By now, one can completely disabuse the notion that conspiracies theories are merely contemporary, 20th and 21st century phenomena or even unique features of any given region, country, political party, or ideological frame. Instead, the said pandemics should illustrate the similarities of conspiratorial thinking regarding infectious disease across time and space. The parallels we see with Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19 can likely be generalized to many pandemics the world has faced or will face: the pervasive proclivities to deny the existence of lethal diseases at their outset, if not their entire lifespan; the pertinacious strains of scepticism and paranoia against governments, scientific institutions, and pharmaceutical companies; and the deep-seated fears of surreptitious, genocidal operations against racialized and sexualized minorities or the societally disadvantaged. Hence, the resurfacing and revivifying of conspiracy themes during epidemics and pandemics are not necessarily the mere result of ignorance, naivete, or fanaticism run amok. Regardless of how nonsensical and non-sequitur they may appear at first blush, these narratives are actually the result of a complex intersection of anxieties spanning the historical and contemporary, the socio-political and psychological, as well as the informational and mythological.

For instance, while it may initially seem outlandish to believe in government-led genocide in terms of Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19, there are nonetheless historical specters that may caution otherwise. In fact, conspiratorial fears of extermination are rooted in past acts of explicit or implicit extermination efforts by a government or an enemy, local or abroad. For instance, the Siege of Fort Pitt in 1763 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is a notorious exemplar in which the British used biological warfare, in the form of gifted blankets laced with smallpox disease, against Indigenous Americans as a deliberate means of deracination.³⁵ In 1900, the Bubonic Plague was used to extirpate Black African politicians in Cape Town, South Africa, and was even legally upheld by apartheid segregationist laws. In the last years of South African apartheid in the late 1980s and 1990s, it was discovered that apartheid government laboratories had been weaponizing biological and chemical agents (e.g., anthrax) to use against Black African leaders.¹² From the 1930s and 1970s, the Tuskegee Study was conducted with 600 Black Americans, in which participants remained oblivious of their syphilis diagnosis. Within this observational study, experimenters actively followed participants, refusing to treat them for devitalizing syphilitic disease, actively denying them known medical treatments, and allowing participant’s family members to contract the disease.³³ Since the original time of enslavement to the mid-20th century, real medical exploitation has occurred on Black Americans: freshly buried Black bodies were exhumed for autopsies and wanton experimentation by the first medical colleges in the U.S., and enslaved Black women underwent unsolicited medical examination and intervention for the sake of advancing American gynecological and obstetrical methods by the father of American gynecology, Dr. James Sims.^21,33 Similarly, Brazilians remember over a century of traumatizing experimentation conducted by American experimenters. Thus, a legacy of distrust collides with the emergence of any infectious disease in Brazil, such as the Chikungunya or Zika viruses in 2013 and 2015, respectively.^4,25,26

When countries are politically polarized, conspiratorial narratives and misinformation campaigns can often manifest. As has been strikingly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, the tense political climate between liberals and conservatives has helped advance distrust in the origins of COVID-19, as well as the proposed methods to contain or eradicate it. For instance, conspiracies of endangered political freedoms have emerged most strongly from right-wingers in their objection to mask-wearing. A political schism arose, in which a large percentage of Trump supporters denied the existence of the disease or the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, while Biden supporters fully believed in the disease and vaccines created by Pfizer and Moderna.^17,32 According to Dr. Tejan, the highly politicized climate between the two ruling political parties in Sierra Leone contributed to the growth of Ebola conspiracies, as the underdog party accused the ruling party of creating Ebola “to kill off the other”.²⁹ In 2016, a highly politicized—and social media amplified—narrative raced through the Philippines after the Sanofi-designed Dengvaxia (e.g., dengue vaccine) resulted in severe and fatal dengue for several children. Ultimately, the vaccine license was revoked, criminal charges and investigations were triggered against government officials, and lawsuits were filed against Sanofi.^3,4

Conspiratorial narratives have also gained traction through the use of scapegoating and hostility toward one’s political, social, and cultural opponents.¹⁷ When syphilis was discovered in Europe in the 1390s, it’s mere existence was shrouded in xenophobic language, as it was given multiple names depending on the location (e.g., “French Sickness” in Germany, “German Sickness” in Poland, “Disease of the Christians” in Turkey, “Disease of the Turks” in Persia, “Polish Sickness” in Russia).¹¹ As seen with Operation Infektion, the conspiracy of HIV/AIDS as a U.S.-invented genocidal machination was promulgated by the Russians to stir up anti-American sentiment and resentment.³⁴ Even the belief that the COVID-19 virus was designed as a bioweapon by China was deemed plausible by a wide swathe of Americans, as it fed into the current context of geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China.¹⁶ Moreover, throughout the U.S. and Great Britain, the thousands of verbally and physically abusive incidents against Asian-appearing people that have occurred since March 2020 demonstrate conspiracy-via-scapegoating in action.¹¹

A prevailing distrust in science, information, and information channels have also fomented conspiracies surrounding infectious disease. For instance, anti-science skepticism—tinged with entrenched partisanship—has been at its height during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal have mounted.²² Between January and March 2020, the Vaccine Confidence Project captured over 240 million digital and social media messages, with an average of 3.08 million messages a day, related to COVID-19; many of them contained disinformation and misinformation. On Twitter alone, there were 113 million COVID-19 commentaries, many of which were speculative, outright false claims, or downright dangerous.16 In the fall of 2020, a YouTube video promoting conspiracy theories that the first COVID-19 vaccines “would kill millions” received 8 million views before it was deleted, despite peer-reviewed evidence and FDA approval of the vaccines.² While not necessarily inventing them, social media, or the “information petri dish of conspiracy“, has appreciably contributed to the rapid propagation of “half-true facts, decontextualized narratives, and false beliefs” surrounding COVID-19.³² And these social media-driven, conspiratorial dynamics have veritable consequences: with the narrative that 5G was causing illness and weakening immune systems, attacks on telecommunications infrastructure and personnel in the U.K. increased. Employees of telecommunications groups have been violently targeted as they have been branded “criminals” and genocidists”.¹¹

However, conspiracies around infectious disease—like those surrounding movie stars, space missions, or historical figures—are underpinned by a quintessential human psychology and sociology. Firstly, there is a need to overcome a sense of powerlessness brought on by the appreciable threat of the pandemic. Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19 have all been terrifying and paralyzing pandemics before the emergence of treatments or vaccinations; however, some people may regain their sense of equilibrium if they just deny the pandemic’s existence. Secondly, conspiracies can allow individuals to cope with threat—would someone rather believe in an invisible and intangible and deadly virus, versus believe in a political, scientific, or pharmaceutical conspiracy to control individual freedoms and corral profit? Thirdly, infectious disease conspiracies can be a way to dispute mainstream politics. As we have seen in the U.S., those with the greatest political enchantment with former President Donald Trump are likely to endorse conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19 since Trump endorsed non-mainstream opinions about the pandemic.¹⁸