In late March, as cases of Covid-19 sped toward 1 million worldwide and deaths approached 50,000, the Democratic Republic of Congo quietly achieved a public health milestone: Forty days with no new cases of Ebola. Few noted that victory, but it holds important lessons for the United States as coronavirus skeptics and conspiracy theorists continue to hinder the nation’s response to the pandemic. In Congo, wild rumors and misinformation about Ebola led to attacks on hospitals and health care workers. Beating back the outbreak there involved a pitched battle not just against the disease, but also against lies and widespread distrust of public health officials. “When you start attacking and killing health care workers, it makes it very difficult to get health care to areas where it’s needed,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me last year when we discussed the Ebola outbreak in Congo. “But when I say that the main issue is an issue of security, it isn’t security alone. It’s intimately connected with a profound distrust within the society.”

Today, Fauci is the top medical expert on the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force and, in the words of President Donald Trump, a “major television star.” The 79-year-old epidemiologist is also the subject of wild right-wing conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and death threats. He now has a nine-person security detail. Last week, in San Pedro, California, an engineer who espoused a conspiracy theory involving the disease intentionally derailed his freight train, sending it careening toward the USNS Mercy, a Navy medical ship providing relief to hospitals overburdened with coronavirus patients. “Misinformation hampers efforts to stop transmission of infectious disease wherever it spreads — and it seems to spread even faster than the disease itself,” said Margaret Harris, a World Health Organization spokesperson and medical doctor who helped fight Ebola in Congo and is now working on the Covid-19 response. “It can even lead to dangerous behaviors that increase the likelihood of being infected or failing to get lifesaving treatment.”

“Misinformation hampers efforts to stop transmission of infectious disease wherever it spreads.”

Among the rumors I heard while covering Ebola in Congo was that the virus was part of a Western extermination campaign supported by local elites; that it was tied to an organ theft plot; and that the disease doesn’t even exist. A Lancet study last March found that 92 percent of those surveyed in Eastern Congo had heard misinformation about Ebola, and almost half of all respondents believed at least some of it. Another study found that 72 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with or mistrustful of the Ebola control efforts in the same region, and 12 percent believed that the disease was “fabricated and did not exist in the area.” Still another scientific paper noted that even among 38 people affected by Ebola — from survivors of the disease to front-line health providers — most “strongly denied the existence of the Ebola virus considering it either as a political ploy to exterminate one ethnic group or as a scheme exaggerated for materialistic reasons.” In Congo, the anti-science resistance also included widespread violence. More than 300 attacks on Ebola health workers left 76 people dead or wounded last year in Congo. An arson attack on an Ebola treatment center in the town of Katwa reportedly killed the brother of a patient; an epidemiologist and two other Ebola health care workers were killed in separate attacks last spring and summer.

“In the U.S., we’ve seen how misinformation has been directly spread by those in the highest levels of power.”