The Tiny U.S. Agency Fighting Covid Conspiracy Theories Doesn’t Stand a Chance
The State Department’s anti-disinformation arm, the GEC, faces falsehoods from China and Russia—and the U.S. president.
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.