False information, including disinformation and conspiracy theories about the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and the origin, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease has been spread through social media, text messaging, and mass media. False information has been propagated by celebrities, politicians, and other prominent public figures. Many countries have passed laws against "fake news", and thousands of people have been arrested for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. The spread of COVID-19 misinformation by governments has also been significant. Commercial scams have claimed to offer at-home tests, supposed preventives, and "miracle" cures. Several religious groups have claimed their faith will protect them from the virus. Without evidence, some people have claimed the virus is a bioweapon accidentally or deliberately leaked from a laboratory, a population control scheme, the result of a spy operation, or the side effect of 5G upgrades to cellular networks. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared an "infodemic" of incorrect information about the virus that poses risks to global health. While belief in conspiracy theories is not a new phenomenon, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this can lead to adverse health effects. Cognitive biases, such as jumping to conclusions and confirmation bias, may be linked to the occurrence of conspiracy beliefs. Uncertainty among experts, when combined with a lack of understanding of the scientific process by laypeople, has likewise been a factor amplifying conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to health effects, harms resulting from the spread of misinformation and endorsement of conspiracy theories include increasing distrust of news organizations and medical authorities as well as divisiveness and political fragmentation.
Overview
In January 2020, the BBC reported on the developing issue of conspiracy theories and bad health advice regarding COVID-19. Examples at the time included false health advice shared on social media and private chats, as well as conspiracy theories such as the outbreak being planned with the participation of the Pirbright Institute. In January, The Guardian listed seven instances of misinformation, adding the conspiracy theories about bioweapons and the link to 5G technology, and including varied false health advice. In an attempt to speed up research sharing, many researchers have turned to preprint servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and SSRN. Papers are uploaded to these servers without peer review or any other editorial process that ensures research quality. Some of these papers have contributed to the spread of conspiracy theories. Preprints about COVID-19 have been extensively shared online and some data suggest that they have been used by the media almost 10 times more than preprints on other topics. According to a study published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, most misinformation related to COVID-19 involves "various forms of reconfiguration, where existing and often true information is spun, twisted, recontextualised, or reworked"; less misinformation "was completely fabricated". The study also found that "top-down misinformation from politicians, celebrities, and other prominent public figures", while accounting for a minority of the samples, captured a majority of the social media engagement. According to their classification, the largest category of misinformation (39%) was "misleading or false claims about the actions or policies of public authorities, including government and international bodies like the WHO or the UN". In addition to social media, television and radio have been perceived as sources of misinformation. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Fox News adopted an editorial line that the emergency response to the pandemic was politically motivated or otherwise unwarranted, and presenter Sean Hannity claimed on-air that the pandemic was a "hoax" (he later issued a denial). When evaluated by media analysts, the effect of broadcast misinformation has been found to influence health outcomes in the population. In a natural experiment (an experiment that takes place spontaneously, without human design or intervention), two similar television news programs that were shown on the Fox News network in February–March 2020 were compared. One program reported the effects of COVID-19 more seriously, while a second program downplayed the threat of COVID-19. The study found that audiences who were exposed to the news downplaying the threat were statistically more susceptible to increased COVID-19 infection rates and death. In August 2021, television broadcaster Sky News Australia was criticised for posting videos on YouTube containing misleading medical claims about COVID-19. Conservative talk radio in the US has also been perceived as a source of inaccurate or misleading commentary on COVID-19. In August and September 2021, several radio hosts who had discouraged COVID-19 vaccination, or expressed scepticism toward the COVID-19 vaccine, subsequently died from COVID-19 complications, among them Dick Farrel, Phil Valentine and Bob Enyart. Misinformation on the subject of COVID-19 has been used by politicians, interest groups, and state actors in many countries for political purposes: to avoid responsibility, scapegoat other countries, and avoid criticism of their earlier decisions. Sometimes there is a financial motive as well. Multiple countries have been accused of spreading disinformation with state-backed operations in the social media in other countries to generate panic, sow distrust, and undermine democratic debate in other countries, or to promote their models of government. A Cornell University study of 38 million articles in English-language media around the world found that US President Donald Trump was the single largest driver of the misinformation. Analysis published by National Public Radio in December 2021 found that as American counties showed higher vote shares for Trump in 2020, COVID-19 vaccination rates significantly decreased and death rates significantly increased. NPR attributed the findings to misinformation.
Virus origin
The consensus among virologists is that the most likely origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to be natural crossover from animals, having spilled-over into the human population from bats, possibly through an intermediate animal host, although the exact transmission pathway has not been determined. Genomic evidence suggests an ancestor virus of SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats. An alternative hypothesis under investigation, deemed unlikely by the majority of virologists given a lack of evidence, is that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the course of standard research. A poll in July 2021 found that 52% of US adults believe COVID-19 escaped from a lab. Unsubstantiated speculation and conspiracy theories related to this topic gained popularity during the pandemic. Common conspiracy theories state that the virus was intentionally engineered, either as a bio-weapon or to profit from the sale of vaccines. According to the World Health Organization, genetic manipulation has been ruled out by genomic analysis. Many other origin stories have also been told, ranging from claims of secret plots by political opponents to a conspiracy theory about mobile phones. In March 2020, the Pew Research Center found that a third of Americans believed COVID-19 had been created in a lab, and a quarter thought it had been engineered intentionally. The spread of these conspiracy theories is magnified through mutual distrust and animosity, as well as nationalism and the use of propaganda campaigns for political purposes. The promotion of misinformation has been used by American far-right groups such as QAnon, by rightwing outlets such as Fox News, by US President Donald Trump and also other prominent Republicans to stoke anti-China sentiments, and has led to increased anti-Asian activity on social media and in the real world. This has also resulted in the bullying of scientists and public health officials, both online and in-person, fuelled by a highly political and oftentimes toxic debate on many issues. Such spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories has the potential to negatively affect public health and diminish trust in governments and medical professionals. The resurgence of the lab leak and other theories was fuelled in part by the publication, in May 2021, of early emails between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Anthony Fauci and scientists discussing the issue. Per the emails in question, Kristian Andersen (author of one study debunking genomic manipulation theories) had examined the possibility, and emailed Fauci proposing possible mechanisms, before ruling out deliberate manipulation. These emails were later misconstrued and used by critics to claim a conspiracy was occurring. The ensuing controversy became known as the "Proximal Origin". However, despite claims to the contrary in some US newspapers, no new evidence has surfaced to support any theory of a laboratory accident, and the majority of peer-reviewed research points to a natural origin. This parallels previous outbreaks of novel diseases, such as HIV, SARS and H1N1, which have also been the subject of allegations of laboratory origin.
Wuhan lab origin
Bio-weapon One early source of the bio-weapon origin theory was former Israeli secret service officer Dany Shoham, who gave an interview to The Washington Times about the biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A scientist from Hong Kong, Li-Meng Yan, fled China and released a preprint stating the virus was modified in a lab rather than having a natural evolution. In an ad hoc peer-review (as the paper was not submitted for traditional peer review as part of the standard scientific publishing process), her claims were labelled as misleading, unscientific, and an unethical promotion of "essentially conspiracy theories that are not founded in fact". Yan's paper was funded by the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, two non-profits linked to Steve Bannon, a former Trump strategist, and Guo Wengui, an expatriate Chinese billionaire. This misinformation was further seized on by the American far-right, who have been known to promote distrust of China. In effect, this formed "a fast-growing echo chamber for misinformation". The idea of SARS-CoV-2 as a lab-engineered weapon is an element of the Plandemic conspiracy theory, which proposes that it was deliberately released by China. The Epoch Times, an anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) newspaper affiliated with Falun Gong, has spread misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in print and via social media including Facebook and YouTube. It has promoted anti-CCP rhetoric and conspiracy theories around the coronavirus outbreak, for example through an 8-page special edition called "How the Chinese Communist Party Endangered the World", which was distributed unsolicited in April 2020 to mail customers in areas of the United States, Canada, and Australia. In the newspaper, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is known as the "CCP virus", and a commentary in the newspaper posed the question, "is the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan an accident occasioned by weaponizing the virus at that [Wuhan P4 virology] lab?" The paper's editorial board suggested that COVID-19 patients cure themselves by "condemning the CCP" and "maybe a miracle will happen". In response to the propagation of theories in the US of a Wuhan lab origin, the Chinese government promulgated the conspiracy theory that the virus was developed by the United States army at Fort Detrick. The conspiracy theory was also promoted by British MP Andrew Bridgen in March 2023. In 2025, the official White House website under the Donald Trump administration claimed that the COVID-19 virus emerged as a result of a leak in a Chinese laboratory.
Gain-of-function research One idea used to support a laboratory origin invokes previous gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Virologist Angela Rasmussen argued that this is unlikely, due to the intense scrutiny and government oversight gain-of-function research is subject to, and that it is improbable that research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses could occur under the radar. The exact meaning of "gain of function" is disputed among experts. In May 2020, Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused Anthony Fauci of having "funded the creation of COVID" through gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Citing an essay by science writer Nicholas Wade, Carlson alleged that Fauci had directed research to make bat viruses more infectious to humans. In a hearing the next day, US senator Rand Paul alleged that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, accusing researchers including epidemiologist Ralph Baric of creating "super-viruses". Both Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins have denied that the US government supported such research. Baric likewise rejected Paul's allegations, saying that his lab's research into the potential in bat coronaviruses for cross-species transmission was not deemed gain-of-function by NIH or the University of North Carolina, where he works. A 2017 study of chimeric bat coronaviruses at the WIV listed NIH as a sponsor; however, NIH funding was only related to sample collection. Based on this and other evidence, The Washington Post rated the claim of an NIH connection to gain-of-function research on coronaviruses as "two pinocchios", representing "significant omissions and/or exaggerations".
Accidental release of collected sample Another theory suggests the virus arose in humans from an accidental infection of laboratory workers by a natural sample. Unfounded online speculation about this scenario has been widespread. In March 2021, an investigatory report released by the WHO described this scenario as "extremely unlikely" and not supported by any available evidence. The report acknowledged, however, that the possibility cannot be ruled out without further evidence. The investigation behind this report operated as a joint collaboration between Chinese and international scientists. At the release briefing for the report, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated the report's calls for a deeper probe into all evaluated possibilities, including the laboratory origin scenario. The study and report were criticised by heads of state from the US, the EU, and other WHO member countries for a lack of transparency and incomplete access to data. Further investigations have also been requested by some scientists, including Anthony Fauci and signatories of a letter published in Science. Since May 2021, some media organizations softened previous language that described the laboratory leak theory as "debunked" or a "conspiracy theory". On the other hand, scientific opinion that an accidental leak is possible, but unlikely, has remained steady. A number of journalists and scientists have said that they dismissed or avoided discussing the lab leak theory during the first year of the pandemic as a result of perceived polarization resulting from Donald Trump's embrace of the theory.
Stolen from Canadian lab Some social media users have alleged that COVID-19 was stolen from a Canadian virus research lab by Chinese scientists. Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada said that this had "no factual basis". The stories seem to have been derived from a July 2019 CBC news article stating that some Chinese researchers had their security access to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, a Level 4 virology lab, revoked after a Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigation. Canadian officials described this as an administrative matter and said there was no risk to the Canadian public. Responding to the conspiracy theories, the CBC stated that its articles "never claimed the two scientists were spies, or that they brought any version of [a] coronavirus to the lab in Wuhan". While pathogen samples were transferred from the lab in Winnipeg to Beijing in March 2019, neither of the samples contained a coronavirus. The Public Health Agency of Canada has stated that the shipment conformed to all federal policies, and that the researchers in question are still under investigation, and thus it cannot be confirmed nor denied that these two were responsible for sending the shipment. The location of the researchers under investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has also not been released. In a January 2020 press conference, NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, when asked about the case, stated that he could not comment specifically on it, but expressed concerns about "increased efforts by the nations to spy on NATO allies in different ways".
Accusations by China
According to The Economist, conspiracy theories exist on China's internet about COVID-19 being created by the CIA in order to "keep China down". According to an investigation by ProPublica, such conspiracy theories and disinformation have been propagated under the direction of China News Service, the country's second largest government-owned media outlet controlled by the United Front Work Department. Global Times and Xinhua News Agency have similarly been implicated in propagating disinformation related to COVID-19's origins. NBC News however has noted that there have also been debunking efforts of US-related conspiracy theories posted online, with a WeChat search of "Coronavirus [disease 2019] is from the U.S." reported to mostly yield articles explaining why such claims are unreasonable. In March 2020, two spokesmen for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian and Geng Shuang, alleged at a press conference that Western powers may have "bio-engineered" COVID-19. They were alluding that the US Army created and spread COVID-19, allegedly during the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan, where numerous cases of influenza-like illness were reported. A member of the U.S. military athletics delegation based at Fort Belvoir, who competed in the 50mi Road Race at the Wuhan games, became the subject of online targeting by netizens accusing her of being "patient zero" of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, and was later interviewed by CNN, to clear her name from the "false accusations in starting the pandemic". In January 2021, Hua Chunying renewed the conspiracy theory from Zhao Lijian and Geng Shuang that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originating in the United States at the U.S. biological weapons lab Fort Detrick. This conspiracy theory quickly went trending on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, and Hua Chunying continued to cite evidence on Twitter, while asking the government of the United States to open up Fort Detrick for further investigation to determine if it is the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In August 2021, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman repeatedly used an official podium to elevate the Fort Detrick's origin unproven idea. According to a report from Foreign Policy, Chinese diplomats and government officials in concert with China's propaganda apparatus and covert networks of online agitators and influencers have responded, focused on repeating Zhao Lijian's allegation relating to Fort Detrick in Maryland, and the "over 200 U.S. biolabs" around the world. In April 2025, the Chinese government "restated its case that COVID-19 may have originated in the United States" according to Reuters.
Accusations by Russia
In February 2020, US officials alleged that Russia is behind an ongoing disinformation campaign, using thousands of social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to deliberately promote unfounded conspiracy theories, claiming the virus is a biological weapon manufactured by the CIA and the US is waging economic war on China using the virus. In March 2022, amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that US President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, as well as billionaire George Soros, were closely tied to Ukrainian biolabs. American right-wing media personalities, such as Tucker Carlson, highlighted the story, while Chinese Communist Party-owned tabloid Global Times further stated that the labs had been studying bat coronaviruses, which spread widely on the Chinese internet for insinuating that the United States had created SARS-CoV-19 in Ukrainian laboratories.
Accusations by other countries According to Washington, DC-based nonprofit Middle East Media Research Institute, numerous writers in the Arabic press have promoted the conspiracy theory that COVID-19, as well as SARS and the swine flu virus, were deliberately created and spread to sell vaccines against these diseases, and it is "part of an economic and psychological war waged by the U.S. against China with the aim of weakening it and presenting it as a backward country and a source of diseases". Accusations in Turkey of Americans creating the virus as a weapon have been reported, and a YouGov poll from August 2020 found that 37% of Turkish respondents believed the US government was responsible for creating and spreading the virus.
An Iranian cleric in Qom said Donald Trump targeted the city with coronavirus "to damage its culture and honor". Several figures associated with the ruling government also claimed that COVID-19 was a "biological attack" by the U.S. against China and Iran. Reza Malekzadeh, Iran's deputy health minister and former Minister of Health, said it was "highly unlikely" that the virus was a biological weapon, noting that the US would be suffering heavily from it. He said Iran was hard-hit because its close ties to China and reluctance to cut air ties introduced the virus, and because early cases had been mistaken for influenza. In Iraq, pro-Iranian social media users waged a Twitter campaign during Trump's Presidency to end U.S. presence in the country by blaming it for the virus. The campaign centered around hashtags such as #Bases_of_the_American_pandemic and #Coronavirus_is_Trump's_weapon. A March 2020 survey by USCENTCOM found that 67% of Iraqi respondents believed a foreign force was behind COVID-19, with 72% of them naming the USA as that force. Theories blaming the USA have also circulated in the Philippines, Venezuela and Pakistan. An October 2020 Globsec poll of Eastern European countries found that 38% of respondents in Montenegro and Serbia, 37% of those in North Macedonia, and 33% in Bulgaria believed the USA deliberately created COVID-19.
Jewish origin
In the Muslim world Iran's Press TV asserted that "Zionist elements developed a deadlier strain of coronavirus against Iran." Similarly, some Arab media outlets accused Israel and the United States of creating and spreading COVID-19, avian flu, and SARS. Users on social media offered other theories, including the allegation that Jews had manufactured COVID-19 to precipitate a global stock market collapse and thereby profit via insider trading, while a guest on Turkish television posited a more ambitious scenario in which Jews and Zionists had created COVID-19, avian flu, and Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever to "design the world, seize countries, [and] neuter the world's population". Turkish politician Fatih Erbakan reportedly said in a speech: "Though we do not have certain evidence, this virus serves Zionism's goals of decreasing the number of people and preventing it from increasing, and important research expresses this." Israeli attempts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine prompted negative reactions in Iran. Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi denied initial reports that he had ruled that a Zionist-made vaccine would be halal, and one Press TV journalist tweeted that "I'd rather take my chances with the virus than consume an Israeli vaccine." A columnist for the Turkish Yeni Akit asserted that such a vaccine could be a ruse to carry out mass sterilization.
In the United States An alert by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding the possible threat of far-right extremists intentionally spreading COVID-19 mentioned blame being assigned to Jews and Jewish leaders for causing the pandemic and several statewide shutdowns.
In Germany Flyers have been found on German tram cars, falsely blaming Jews for the pandemic. In April 2022, two members of the Reichsbürger movement (later implicated in the 2022 German coup d'état plot) were charged with conspiring to kidnap the German health minister Karl Lauterbach.
In Britain According to a study carried out by the University of Oxford in early 2020, nearly one-fifth of respondents in England believed to some extent that Jews were responsible for creating or spreading the virus with the motive of financial gain.
Muslims spreading virus
In India, Muslims have been blamed for spreading infection following the emergence of cases linked to a Tablighi Jamaat religious gathering. There are reports of vilification of Muslims on social media and attacks on individuals in India. Claims have been made that Muslims are selling food contaminated with SARS-CoV-2 and that a mosque in Patna was sheltering people from Italy and Iran. These claims were shown to be false. In the UK, there are reports of far-right groups blaming Muslims for the pandemic and falsely claiming that mosques remained open after the national ban on large gatherings.
Population-control scheme
According to the BBC, Jordan Sather, a YouTuber supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory and the anti-vax movement, has falsely claimed that the outbreak was a population-control scheme created by the Pirbright Institute in England and by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. In mid-2020, a hoax spread on social media claiming that World Bank documents showed that they had been planning pandemic measures since 2017 or 2018, even though the documents did not mention COVID-19 until they were updated after the pandemic began. A similar hoax also spread at the same time, which involved an alleged test to detect COVID-19 patented by the Rothschild family in 2015, even though in reality the patent did not mention COVID-19 at all before 2020, and it was only updated after the pandemic began. In Germany, it had been repeatedly falsely claimed on the Internet during the pandemic that the German government and the Robert Koch Institute had acknowledged the non-existence of COVID-19. Piers Corbyn was described as "dangerous" by physician and broadcaster Hilary Jones during their joint interview on Good Morning Britain in early September 2020. Corbyn described COVID-19 as a "psychological operation to close down the economy in the interests of mega-corporations" and stated "vaccines cause death".
5G mobile networks
The first conspiracy theories purporting a link between COVID-19 and 5G mobile networks had already appeared by the end of January 2020. Such claims spread rapidly on social media networks, leading to the spread of misinformation in what has been likened to a "digital wildfire". In March 2020, Thomas Cowan, a holistic medical practitioner who trained as a physician and operates on probation with the Medical Board of California, alleged that COVID-19 is caused by 5G. He based this on the claims that African countries had not been affected significantly by the pandemic and Africa was not a 5G region. Cowan also falsely alleged that the viruses were waste from cells that were poisoned by electromagnetic fields, and that historical viral pandemics coincided with major developments in radio technology. The video of Cowan's claims went viral and was recirculated by celebrities, including Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, and singer Keri Hilson. The claims may also have been recirculated by an alleged "coordinated disinformation campaign", similar to campaigns used by the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The claims were criticized on social media and debunked by Reuters, USA Today, Full Fact and American Public Health Association executive director Georges C. Benjamin. Cowan's claims were repeated by Mark Steele, a conspiracy theorist who claimed to have first-hand knowledge that 5G was in fact a weapon system capable of causing symptoms identical to those produced by the virus. Kate Shemirani, a former nurse who had been struck off the UK nursing registry and had become a promoter of conspiracy theories, repeatedly claimed that these symptoms were identical to those produced by exposure to electromagnetic fields. Steve Powis, national medical director of NHS England, described theories linking 5G mobile-phone networks to COVID-19 as the "worst kind of fake news". Viruses cannot be transmitted by radio waves, and COVID-19 has spread and continues to spread in many countries that do not have 5G networks. There were 20 suspected arson attacks on phone masts in the UK over the 2020 Easter weekend. These included an incident in Dagenham where three men were arrested on suspicion of arson, a fire in Huddersfield that affected a mast used by emergency services, and a fire in a mast that provides mobile connectivity to the NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham. Some telecom engineers reported threats of violence, including threats to stab and murder them, by individuals who believe them to be working on 5G networks. In April 2020, Gardaí and fire services were called to fires at 5G masts in County Donegal, Ireland. The Gardaí were treating the fires as arson. After the arson attacks, British Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said the theory that COVID-19 virus may be spread by 5G wireless communication is "just nonsense, dangerous nonsense as well". Telecommunications provider Vodafone announced that two Vodafone masts and two it shares with O2, another provider, had been targeted. By April 2020, at least 20 mobile-phone masts in the UK had been vandalised. Because of the slow rollout of 5G in the UK, many of the damaged masts had only 3G and 4G equipment. Mobile-phone and home broadband operators estimated there were at least 30 incidents where engineers maintaining equipment were confronted in the week up to 6 April. As of 30 May, there had been 29 incidents of attempted arson at mobile-phone masts in the Netherlands, including one case where "Fuck 5G" was written. There have also been incidents in Ireland and Cyprus. Facebook has deleted messages encouraging attacks on 5G equipment. A study authored by doctors Robert R. Brown and Beverly Rubik which concluded that a causal link between the virus and 5G was non-existent was misinterpreted on social media as evidence of a relation between the two. Engineers working for Openreach, a division of British Telecom, posted pleas on anti-5G Facebook groups asking to be spared abuse as they are not involved with maintaining mobile networks. Industry lobby group Mobile UK said the incidents were affecting the maintenance of networks that support home working and provide critical connections to vulnerable customers, emergency services, and hospitals. A widely circulated video showed a woman accusing employees of broadband company Community Fibre of installing 5G as part of a plan to kill the population. Of those who believed that 5G networks caused COVID-19 symptoms, 60% stated that much of their knowledge about the virus came from YouTube. In April 2020, YouTube announced that it would reduce the amount of content claiming links between 5G and COVID-19. Videos that are conspiratorial about 5G that do not mention COVID-19 would not be removed, though they might be considered "borderline content" and therefore removed from search recommendations, losing advertising revenue. The discredited claims had been circulated by British conspiracy theorist David Icke in videos (subsequently removed) on YouTube and Vimeo, and an interview by London Live TV network, prompting calls for action by Ofcom. It took YouTube on average 41 days to remove Covid-related videos containing false information in the first half of 2020. Ofcom issued guidance to ITV following comments by Eamonn Holmes about 5G and COVID-19 on This Morning. Ofcom said the comments were "ambiguous" and "ill-judged" and they "risked undermining viewers' trust in advice from public authorities and scientific evidence". Ofcom also found local channel London Live in breach of standards for an interview it had with David Icke. It said that he had "expressed views which had the potential to cause significant harm to viewers in London during the pandemic". In April 2020, The Guardian revealed that Jonathan Jones, an evangelical pastor from Luton, had provided the male voice on a recording blaming 5G for deaths caused by COVID-19. He claimed to have formerly headed the largest business unit at Vodafone, but insiders at the company said that he was hired for a sales position in 2014 when 5G was not a priority for the company and that 5G would not have been part of his job. He had left Vodafone after less than a year. A tweet started an internet meme that Bank of England £20 banknotes contained a picture of a 5G mast and the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Facebook and YouTube removed items pushing this story, and fact checking organisations established that the picture is of Margate Lighthouse and the "virus" is the staircase at the Tate Britain.
American scientist selling virus to China In April 2020, rumours circulated on Facebook, alleging that the US Government had "just discovered and arrested" Charles Lieber, chair of the Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department at Harvard University for "manufacturing and selling" the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) to China. According to a report from Reuters, posts spreading the rumour were shared in multiple languages over 79,000 times on Facebook. Lieber was arrested in January 2020, and later charged with two federal counts of making an allegedly false statement about his links to a Chinese university, unrelated to the virus. The rumour of Lieber, a chemist in an area entirely unrelated to the virus research, developing COVID-19 and selling it to China has been discredited.
Meteor origin In 2020, a group of researchers that included Edward J. Steele and Chandra Wickramasinghe, the foremost living proponent of panspermia, speculated in ten research papers that COVID-19 originated from a meteor spotted as a bright fireball over the city of Songyuan in Northeast China in October 2019 and that a fragment of the meteor landed in the Wuhan area, which started the first COVID-19 outbreaks. However, the group of researchers did not provide any direct evidence proving this conjecture. In an August 2020 article, Astronomy.com called the meteor origin conjecture "so remarkable that it makes the others look boring by comparison".
NCMI intelligence report In April 2020, ABC News reported that, in November 2019, "U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China's Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population". The article stated that the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), had produced an intelligence report in November 2019 which raised concerns about the situation. The director of the NCMI, Col. R. Shane Day said "media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists".
PCR testing Social media posts have falsely claimed that Kary Mullis, the inventor of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), said that PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 does not work. Mullis, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of PCR, died in August 2019 before the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and never made these statements. Several posts claim Mullis said "PCR tests cannot detect free infectious viruses at all", that PCR testing was designed to detect any non-human DNA or the DNA and RNA of the person being tested, or that the process of DNA amplification used in PCR will lead to contamination of the samples. A video of a 1997 interview with Mullis has also been widely circulated, in which Mullis says PCR will find "anything"; the video description asserts that this means PCR cannot be used to reliably detect SARS-CoV-2. In reality, the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test for SARS-CoV-2 is highly sensitive to the virus, and testing laboratories have controls in place to prevent and detect contamination. However, the tests only reveal the presence of the virus and not whether it remains infectious. A claim attributed to the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health that PCR testing is fraudulent became popular in the Philippines and remains a widespread belief. According to a report from AFP, research associate Joshua Miguel Danac of the University of the Philippines' National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology debunked the claim, calling PCR tests "the gold standard for diagnosis". Fake testing and perception of fake testing remains a problem in the Philippines.
Symptoms and severity In early 2020, there were a number of viral photos and videos that were mischaracterized as showing an extreme severity to COVID-19 exposure. In January and February 2020, a number of videos from China were circulated on social media that purported to show people infected with COVID-19 either suddenly collapsing, or having already collapsed, on the street. Some of these videos were republished or referenced by some tabloid newspapers, including the Daily Mail and The Sun. However, the people in these videos are generally believed to have been suffering from something other than COVID-19, such as one who was drunk. A video from February 2020 purported to be of dead COVID-19 victims in China was actually a video from Shenzhen of people sleeping on the street. Similarly, a photo that circulated in March 2020 of dozens of people lying down in the street, purported to be of COVID-19 victims in either China or Italy, was in fact a photo of living people from a 2014 art project in Germany.
Incidence and mortality Correctly reporting the number of people who were sick or who had died was difficult, especially during the earliest days of the pandemic.
In China
Chinese under-reporting during early 2020 Leaked documents show that China's public reporting of cases gave an incomplete picture during the early stages of the pandemic. For example, in February 2020, China publicly reported 2,478 new confirmed cases. However, confidential internal documents that later leaked to CNN showed 5,918 new cases in February. These were broken down as 2,345 confirmed cases, 1,772 clinically diagnosed cases and 1,796 suspected cases.
Nurse whistleblower In January 2020, a video circulated online appearing to be of a nurse named Jin Hui in Hubei, describing a far more dire situation in Wuhan than reported by Chinese officials. However, the BBC said that, contrary to its English subtitles in one of the video's existing versions, the woman does not claim to be either a nurse or a doctor in the video and that her suit and mask do not match the ones worn by medical staff in Hubei. The video claimed that more than 90,000 people had been infected with the virus in China, that the virus could spread from one person to 14 people (R0 = 14) and that the virus was starting a second mutation. The video attracted millions of views on various social media platforms and was mentioned in numerous online reports. The claimed R0 of 14 in the video was noted by the BBC to be inconsistent with the expert estimation of 1.4 to 2.5 at that time. The video's claim of 90,000 infected cases was noted to be 'unsubstantiated'.
Alleged leak of death toll by Tencent In February 20