The U.S. Department Of Conspiracy Theory Preparedness

Deep inside the Deep State, a tiny agency is working to stop Covid-19 disinformation. Under Trump, it hasn’t stood a chance

- Por Joshua Brustein

The stories about Bill Gates started circulating in late January, around the time health officials announced the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the U.S. According to certain—ahem—sources, the novel coronavirus hadn’t come from bats, but from Gates, the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft Corp. co-founder. It wasn’t entirely clear why he would engineer a global pandemic, but versions of the conspiracy theory pinned it on Gates’s supposed desire to cull Earth’s population, or possibly to surveil it.

Then again, if it wasn’t Bill Gates, maybe it was the U.S. Army that had unleashed the virus, in an effort to undercut a rising China. Or it was created by a Chinese military lab in Wuhan. Or it was a consequence of 5G wireless networks, a view that some people in the U.K. took so seriously they went out and destroyed actual 5G towers.

There were also strange ideas about treatments. While doctors widely believed the virus to be untreatable with existing drugs, there were reports of a game-changing therapy that involved drinking industrial bleach—“Miracle Mineral Solution,” proponents called it.

These conspiracy theories circulated widely online as the virus spread, prompting warnings of an “infodemic” from public health officials. In late February, a little-known division of the U.S. State Department, the Global Engagement Center, or GEC, said the Russian government had pushed the Gates rumor. On May 8, the GEC said it had identified a network of fake Twitter accounts being used to spread disinformation, this time on behalf of China.