As the coronavirus pandemic has swept across the globe, so, too, have a myriad conspiracy theories about its origin and general misinformation about its severity and how to prevent its spread. This “infodemic,” as the World Health Organization has labeled it, has been fueled in part by conservative media and right-wing social media users. A peer-reviewed survey by the Harvard Kennedy School published this week found a correlation between consumers of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative news sources and coronavirus “conspiracy theories including believing that some in the CDC were exaggerating the seriousness of the virus to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump.”

Fox News and Trump himself amplified many of these misguided COVID-19 beliefs. Sean Hannity hosted a supposed medical expert in early March who insisted “this virus should be compared to the flu. Because at worst, at worst, worst-case scenario it could be the flu,” while the president said “treat this like you treat the flu” in late February. (During the early weeks of the U.S. outbreak, CNN, MSNBC, and CBS News aired segments of their own likening coronavirus to the seasonal flu or, at worst, claiming it was less serious.) That same month, Limbaugh, the top right-wing radio host, took this line of downplaying a step further, saying, “I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” The Harvard study shed light on how widespread this idea has become, as 38% of respondents believe that both COVID-19 and the flu are “as likely as the other to result in death.” Tucker Carlson, who vies with Hannity as the top-rated cable-news host on any given night, speculated that “this is not a naturally occurring virus, that it was somehow created by the Chinese government,” giving credence to debunked theories that the coronavirus is a lab-hatched bioweapon during a Fox News segment in early February. As for the belief that the coronavirus was created to hurt Trump, both Hannity, who accused the media of trying to scare “the living hell out of people” and “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax” early last month, and the president, who called the virus the Democrats and media’s “new hoax” in late February, have made this assertion to their massive respective audiences.

Once highly influential conservative hosts have peddled misinformation out to millions, the wide use of social media during the pandemic makes it nearly impossible to slow its spread. Using artificial intelligence to track the posting habits of right-leaning Twitter accounts over the past three months, Graphika, a social-network-analysis company, published a report this week that found “conservative groups have a larger total presence than liberal groups in the disinformation map, and the combined volume of activity from conservative groups is 27%, compared with 8% from left-leaning groups. This indicates not only that there are more right-wing accounts, but these accounts are also more prolifically producing content than their left-wing counterparts.” Perhaps the most disturbing instance of this disinformation came via proponents of QAnon, as Graphika found a significant overlap between social media users pushing the conspiracy theory alongside coronavirus myths. “Habitual sharers of health misinformation increased their share of voice in coronavirus conversations in February. Of the accounts that exist in both [the coronavirus discussion and health misinformation] networks, 66% sit within the U.S. Right-Wing clusters.”

Meanwhile, Democrats who participated in the Harvard study were more likely than their Republican counterparts “to know that the coronavirus is more lethal than the flu” and to eschew theories claiming the “Chinese government created the virus as a bioweapon.” Alternatively, poll respondents who looked to mainstream outlets like the New York Times and NBC News expressed “accurate information about the disease’s lethality and…beliefs about protection from infection.” Indeed, the authors found that access to mainstream news outlets acted as one antidote to this “infodemic,” especially since many top outlets like the Washington Post and the Times dropped their paywalls for coronavirus-related stories. “Exposure to mainstream print was positively associated with holding more accurate beliefs about prevention of infection,” they wrote. “[E]xposure to sources such as the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal was positively associated with accurately believing that regular hand washing and avoiding contact with symptomatic people prevent infection.”

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