Lab Leak Truthers are Pandemic Deniers.
The false internal logic of being mad about a lab leak, but being cool with spreading the virus.
In case anyone hasn’t heard yet, or Robert Redfield wasn’t obvious enough for people, lab leak conspiracy theory is part of the right-wing anti-democratic, anti-communist, fascist, climate denial, covid contrarian, Great Barrington Declaration, Project 2025, Heritage Foundation, Koch money funded narratives pushed for various financial, political, and geopolitical reasons. It’s all within the same movement. Allison Neitzel points out on Science-Based Medicine that “the GBD and the lab leak were highlighted in the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation’s “Road Map for COVID-19 Congressional Oversight” published a month ahead of the first HSSCP hearing featuring Bhattacharya.” and that the “GOP-led subcommittee appears to be following this script and has focused on the lab leak…” And people within this movement are looking for any excuse to back up their fascist fantasies, sending out vigilante death squads, or as Ivan Raiklin described it: “livestreamed swatting raids” on public health figures and others on an enemies list.
Jonathan Howard recently published commentary on Science-Based Medicine asking a legitimate question: “why supposedly releasing a deadly virus was mass murder, but intentionally spreading it was a forgivable “policy position.”
Make it make sense, right?
I guess I have to go over how this is explained because if you only know what they’re saying to you — (to “trigger the libs” and such), you don’t necessarily know what they say to each other in their safe spaces, and so then you won’t understand the context of narrative stories that while absolutely false and ill-conceived, do have internal coherence to the adherents.
People buying into this conspiracy fiction and political ideology are led to think that there was a sinister plot to make covid in a lab, but they don’t actually think that the virus itself was the murder part. They believe the lab leak gave cover and excuse for “the deep state” to “do lockdowns” or make people wear masks as some kind of control tactic, and they believe it was ultimately machination to make people get vaccines as a sinister plot to kill people, or at least harm everyone. There are a buffet of potential motives to choose from, but that’s another level of the narrative. The bottom line is, for the diehard lab leak truthers, it’s not spreading covid that kills people, they believe wrongly the vaccines are killing people, and that “lockdowns” harmed people — and that’s how they square it where it makes sense for lab leak truthers to think it’s ok to spread the virus.
So when these pundits or the followers of this stuff say that covid has been “weaponized” many of us may assume that is a tacit recognizing that covid is deadly, but that’s not necessarily the case. Yes there are in fact even right-wingers who recognize covid is bad. I know of Trump voting Republicans and even people into at least some MAGA conspiracy theories who also don’t want to get covid, and some even use masks at their workplace or during the holiday season to avoid it, because they’re living in practical reality. But they’re probably not the same people who believe masks are “lockdown”, or think that kids should go to school sick, or that clinically vulnerable kids needed to be sacrificed and die to stop the sickness spreading. The Qanon conspiracy theory information landscape has a religion-esque type quality in that there’s lots of room for “sects” and for people to treat it like a buffet, picking and choosing which parts to believe. Past polling revealed that when asked about individual conspiracy fictions or ideas that are under the umbrella of Qanon, a lot of people believe some but not others. And that most conservatives believe at least one Qanon concept.
On the Knowledge Fight podcast covering the September 11th Alex Jones show, you can hear Alex Jones sing about supposedly the shots killing people. Anti-vax conspiracy fictions have been made into entertainment and ritual, as well as a motivation for potentially violent mobilization. Alex Jones is also a 9–11 truther as well, who espouses the U.S. government “deep state” was the real perpetrator who collapsed the World Trade Center towers. I’m sorry that I can’t explain how they square wanting retribution against Muslims and Arabs for September 11th, while at the same time NOT blaming them for doing the September 11th attack. I just haven’t really looked into this particular genre of fringe myself. There may be some internal logic, or maybe it’s like when Donald Trump tells obvious lies and his die hard fans don’t care because they feel like “they’re in on it” with him. On the same 9/11/2024 episode of Alex Jones, a caller said that basically he knew the “eating the pets” story wasn’t really true, but he didn’t care because at least it drew attention to “the immigrants” in Ohio. A few days later JD Vance went on national news and more or less said the same: “But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story…”
And so we have no way to know for sure if the lab leak assertions are even genuine or disingenuous, do we?