Today, Explained - Conspiracy-19

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Vox’s science editor, Eliza Barclay, arms you with the facts you need to fight your uncle’s favorite coronavirus conspiracy theories. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Thursday, April 23rd, 2020. We've got April showers in the District of Columbia. It's Ramadan. I'm Sean Ramos-Furman. This is your coronavirus update from Today Explained. Mosques are shut down across the world and Muslims are being urged to worship from home. But in Pakistan, a bunch of prominent imams have urged the faithful to ignore stay-at-home orders. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is urging the country's regional leaders to hold the line on stay-at-home orders. She told Parliament, let us not squander what we have achieved, except probably in German. Across Europe and even in Canada, governments are stepping in to at least partially pay the salaries of workers who have been laid off. And for something different in the United States, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is encouraging states to take the Donald Trump approach and just declare bankruptcy.

He told a conservative radio host there's not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations. Democrats, of course, have been pushing pretty hard for more aid to state governments in the pending stimulus package. McConnell is now calling such aid blue state bailouts. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said McConnell's bankruptcy idea was, quote, one of the saddest, really dumb comments of all time, and pointed out that McConnell's home state of Kentucky gets more federal money for services than it contributes, while New York gives more than it gets. Mitch McConnell is up for re-election in November. Researchers at Northeastern University have found that putting a nylon stocking over your homemade

masks might help keep out the coronavirus. Evidently, it'll boost your ability to filter out small particles in the air. And if under that nylon and homemade mask you're sporting juggalo face, I have terrible news. The Insane Clown Posse has canceled its annual gathering of the juggalos. For those of you who don't pay attention to clown hip-hop, Juggalos are the devout fans of the Faygo drinking Detroit duo, the Insane Clown Posse, aka ICP. In the spirit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel,

ICP said, the bottom line is simply that we refuse to risk even one Juggalo life by hosting a gathering during these troubling times. We will endure this together as a family and the gathering of the juggalos will return in 2021 stronger, bigger, and better

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a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions must be 19 years of age or older to wager ontario only please play responsibly if you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you please contact connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge betmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. There are a lot of conspiracy theories circulating online about this novel coronavirus,

and we haven't yet spoken about any of them on this show because there's so much factual information that we want to help you guys understand. But since so many people have been asking about these things and we see friends and family members actually taking them seriously now, it felt like a good time to explain the coronavirus conspiracy theories. And to help, we have Vox's science editor, Eliza Barkley. Eliza, you've written about these conspiracy theories a couple times now, right? Yeah, I wrote one piece in early March where I talked about a couple of conspiracy intense emails and tweets, some of them very angry, some of them very troll-y, challenging my interpretation of them since I wrote the first piece in March. Yeah. Is the president emailing you? No. But I think some of his supporters and then others who just find some of these theories very tantalizing. And how many you got?

Well, there are several at this stage. Some are minor, and some are more powerful in terms of, you know, who we see repeating them or using them as political tools. But I'd say there's about six. One I would actually classify not quite as a conspiracy theory, but more as political tools. But I'd say there's about six. One, I would actually classify not quite as a conspiracy theory, but more as a theory. The other five, we can probably classify as conspiracy theories. Okay. And these are all about the origins of the coronavirus, right? Yes. Okay. Well, let's go down the spectrum, starting with the least plausible. What do you got? So there are some people who actually don't want to believe that this is even a pandemic or a crisis as portrayed by the media.

They're scaring the living hell out of people. And I see it again as like, oh, let's bludgeon Trump with this new hoax. So conspiracy theory number one, the entire pandemic is a hoax. Yes. Or even the pandemic as highly deadly as a hoax. Okay, great. Let's move on then. Sorry, pandemic is a hoax. Let's go to conspiracy theory number two. What's that one? In the last couple of weeks, it seems there's now tens of thousands of Facebook posts

alleging that Bill Gates was involved with the origin of this virus. The Windows guy. Yes, that guy who, yes, also happens to be the world's top donor to global health causes. Apparently the source of this is a 2015 speech where Bill Gates warned that If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. We're not ready for the next epidemic. So they're mad at Bill Gates for, like, understanding the risks of a pandemic? Yeah. He's being called the creator of COVID-19 and a profiteer from a potential virus vaccine.

Does Bill Gates have the vaccine? Can we get it? Absolutely not. He's funding vaccine efforts, but I think if he had the vaccine, he would be very happy to give it to the world. Okay, so let's give Bill some credit. He didn't create this pandemic to profit off a vaccine. He's already quite rich. What's conspiracy theory number three, Eliza? Conspiracy theory number three is that there is a direct link between 5G wireless networks and the COVID-19 illness. Some people in the UK bought into it so much they started lighting cell phone towers on fire. 5G burning, burning, burning, burning, burning. A Belgian doctor earlier this year claimed that there was a possible link between 5G and coronavirus and that then people kind of ran with that. The theory is that 5G damages the human immune system.

5G gets switched on, people drop like flies. Of course, that's not true. There is no evidence showing that. What if this is really a conspiracy to keep everyone satisfied with their 4G networks? You know, people push these conspiracy theories for all kinds of reasons. So that could be one. Okay, so we're going to leave 5G there. It sounds like there's like maybe one or two doctors who believe it, but a lot who don't. And there's also the fact that the coronavirus is spreading in countries that do not have 5G. Let's continue onward. What's the fourth conspiracy theory? So this one, I think, had a little bit more life earlier on.

And it is that the virus was created in a lab. And interestingly, scientists around the world have been sequencing the virus's genome as they do with pathogens like this. And what they can see when they sequence a genome is that this virus very clearly evolved in nature. Scientists who've published peer-reviewed papers on this say conclusively that SARS-CoV-2 virus is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus. It's so different actually from all the other viruses out there that it only could have been invented by nature. As one virologist said, humans could not have dreamed this up, this virus up. And so I think we can be very confident that this virus was not bioengineered for those reasons.

What's conspiracy number five? So connected to this previous theory is the conspiracy theory that the virus was a bioweapon intentionally released by China on the world to kill people, cause harm, disrupt the global order. You know, I had one person who believes this theory contact me to say, you know, maybe China wasn't trying to kill a lot of people, but they are just trying to cause a lot of disruption so that they can emerge as the world's top superpower, put the United States and other countries on their knees. First of all, there's no evidence this virus existed before it started infecting people. So there's no evidence that China had isolated in the lab. So it seems pretty much impossible that it was intentionally released

by China. Okay, so conspiracy theory number five doesn't work for basically the same reasons as conspiracy number four? Correct. So does the same reasons as conspiracy number four? Correct. So does that bring us to conspiracy number six, the one you think that has the most credibility? Well, here's how I would put it. I would say it actually doesn't have a lot of credibility, but it's the one that we cannot 100% rule out. There have been reports U.S. diplomats are concerned about a lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the outbreak began.

So this is the theory that also, I would say, is politically the most important one at the moment, in that it's being discussed by President Trump, by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. No strangers to conspiracy theories, to be fair, right? To be fair, yes. More and more we're hearing the story. We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation. And then we know they have this lab and we know about the wet markets. We know that the virus itself did originate in Wuhan,

so all those things come together. And this is the theory that, okay, the virus maybe wasn't engineered nor intentionally released as a bioweapon, but that it was accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One of the interesting facts of the outbreak is that the same city where the virus first appeared also happens to be the city where China has its only BSL-4 lab where scientists do work on these very dangerous viruses. And so a lot of people right off the bat started wondering, wow, what if this virus was being studied in that lab? And what if it was either intentionally or accidentally released? We see intelligence officials and we see other government officials saying that they have not

entirely ruled this out in their investigation of the virus origin. And indeed, all the scientists I've spoken to say they also cannot 100% rule this out. But they point to a lot of other evidence that really makes the case for why this is a very unlikely event. More with Eliza after a break. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. Thank you. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply.

Okay, Eliza, we've been through the six conspiracy theories. You said only one of them even is remotely possible, and that is the final one we talked about, which is that this novel coronavirus may have accidentally escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China, through a person who worked in the lab. How does that theory contradict the other one that we've spoken about on this show before, that this probably originated with a live animal, a bat, or something of that sort? Yeah, so scientists who study coronaviruses

and also other emerging infectious diseases like H1N1 and Ebola, you know, they have said from the beginning, as soon as the sequence of the genome of this new virus was available, it's very clear that this virus shares a genome with other known bat viruses. And so for that reason, it's just very clearly a virus that originated in bats. Now, what we don't know still is when exactly this virus might have made the leap from bats to humans. We also don't know if there was potentially an intermediary species. So in other coronaviruses like MERS, which emerged in the Middle East, or SARS-1, which emerged in China in 2003, several scientists believe that there were, in fact, intermediary hosts, as they're called. With MERS, the virus may have originated in bats, but then infected camels, which then infected humans.

In SARS-1, the 2003 SARS, it's believed that the virus originated in bats and then may have infected civet cats, which then infected humans. Although there's not even total certainty on that. So with this virus, it's very clear that it did begin in bats. And the bat that had this virus or the group of bats that had this virus may have directly infected humans or there may have also been an intermediary species that hasn't yet been identified. There's been a little bit of talk of pangolins as the intermediary species, but we're not really sure. And I'm looking up pangolins here, and it looks like it's a scaly anteater? Yes. Learn something every day. So it looks very much like bats are the origin here either way. Where does that leave us with this finding its way to a human in a lab in Wuhan? The Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers did have some samples

of viruses that were circulating in bats. What we know from a really excellent story in Scientific American is that the leader of the bat coronavirus research group, a researcher named Shi Zhongli, who, by the way, is well known in international scientific circles. As soon as she heard about the new coronavirus circulating in Wuhan, she was in Shanghai, and she got on a train back to Wuhan immediately to sequence the virus and figure out, did it match any of the viruses that they already had in the lab? Because yes, she also considered the possibility, what if this new virus is one of the ones we were studying? And she says, and she's also been backed up by others at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that no, the new coronavirus does not match any of the viruses that they were studying.

One of the things that the scientists I've interviewed point to immediately when other people are hypothesizing about the lab leak is that let's look at what we do know about how frequently bats and humans in Southeast Asia are interacting. There are hundreds of millions of bats in Southeast Asia, and scientists have found that 10% of bats in some colonies have viruses. So that's hundreds of thousands of bats with viruses. And meanwhile, you've got tens of thousands of humans in the wildlife trade who are hunting and killing wildlife in China and other countries in Southeast Asia. And people are interacting with bats in all kinds of different ways. They're hunting them. They're eating them.

Sometimes they use their poop for fertilizer. They're going into their caves like for fun. So there's just a ton of different ways in which bats and humans are around each other. And it's actually, I think this is the thing that's a little bit hard for us in the U.S. perhaps to wrap our heads around. You know, we have bats too, but we don't have nearly as many bats and we're not really up in bats kind of habitat nearly as much. But when bats come into contact with humans and if the virus is able to replicate and stay alive in humans,

then it's great for the virus. And by the way, you know, of course, other mammals, other insects can also host viruses, but bats are unusual in that they're a reservoir for so many viruses, and many of which we haven't even discovered yet. But we know they're out there. We know the vaccine is still a year, if not more, away, notwithstanding some sort of miracle. When will we know what the full truth is here as to the origins of this coronavirus? It's a great question. Finding patient zeros can be very time-consuming. It can

be very difficult to trace a virus back to the very first person who got infected. And even then, the potential spillover event. So how that first person who was infected by a bat or by an intermediary species was infected, it may not be clear. Like it may not be so clear cut as this person ate a bat. I mean, of course, there's a lot of talk about maybe it emerged in this wildlife market, but maybe it didn't. And maybe somebody was infected completely unknowingly. So there's so many possibilities

in terms of that spillover event. I think that we can assume that that investigation is happening in China, but we have no idea how long it'll take, nor whether we will ever get total clarity on where did this all begin. That being said, I mean, as you've mentioned, there are scientists who are thinking about, who are talking about, who are trying to figure out where this came from. Why is it important to understand where this novel coronavirus originated? Well, I think to understand what types of interactions between bats and humans are most

risky, or humans and intermediary species. I mean, we already know that these wet markets, these wildlife markets that are all over China and in a lot of other countries in Southeast Asia are risky because people are eating wildlife like bats. I mean, that's not very common, but it still goes on. And these bats carry viruses. So if we were to learn, for instance, that indeed the market was involved or that some other practice, some other habit of using bat feces on a farm, that that was how this emerged, we would be able to clearly say, okay, that's a high-risk activity. We should stop doing that or we should need to adjust. So it is about minimizing risk in the future. If you can figure out where this came from,

you can potentially prevent the next spillover event. Eliza Barkley is Vox's science editor, but she writes sometimes to her article on why scientists doubt the novel coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab dropped today at Vox.com. Some of the conspiracies we talked about on the show today are pretty one-dimensional, but not so for the theory that all of this is caused by 5G. As Eliza mentioned, it's a pretty weak theory, but people are acting on this one.

They're burning down cell towers, and that has serious implications. Our friends over at the Reset podcast covered the 5G conspiracy theory in much more detail on Tuesday, so why don't you do a double feature and go listen to that right now. Thanks, stay smart, check your sources, take care. Thank you.