What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: “Disease X” Conspiracies
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, just like Disease X, an ominous-sounding disease that doesn’t actually exist. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization published its annual list of “priority diseases,” or diseases that “pose the greatest risk to public health due to their epidemic potential and/or the absence or inadequacy of countermeasures.” At the bottom of the list, below Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and Rift Valley fever, is Disease X, which, as Lifehacker senior health editor Beth Scavrecchi explained in January, is a general term for a disease outbreak that has not yet occurred. .
Normal people (at least the few who noticed) responded by thinking, “That’s cool, we should really prepare for new and previously unknown pathogens because look how COVID caught us off guard.” However, conspiracy theorists and scammers have taken the term “Disease X” and started using it to create an imaginary illness that fits into (and contributes to) their larger, paranoia-based worldview.
According to Alex Jones , Disease X is the “secret weapon of the New World Order”, a “weapon of genocide” that will soon be used by the “globalists”. Twitter users have posted (highly dubious) videos of helicopters supposedly dropping mosquitoes infected with Disease X on the population , shared photos of mobile cremation vans from China intended for victims of Disease X ( fake, of course ), and speculated that Disease X spread through cocaine . These are just some of the many crazy theories circulating on the Internet.
What exactly is disease X?
Despite the nonsense of Alex Jones and company, Disease X is not a new deadly infection. It’s not even real. As the World Health Organization is at pains to explain in the report that mentions it, “Disease X” is the term the organization uses to talk about any as-yet-unknown pathogen that may threaten public health. Like the letter X in an algebra problem, the name represents the “knowable unknown” when discussing how best to use public health resources. The term has been used by WHO since 2018 and was first proposed in 2015 as a way to shorten the time between detection of viral outbreaks and approval of vaccines or treatments.
In the pre-pandemic days of 2018, Jonathan Quick, chairman of the US-based Global Health Council, told The Telegraph that talking about “Disease X” could be a way to overcome public complacency about disease outbreaks. “There is a cycle of panic and complacency. We are currently slipping back into complacency,” Quick said.
But Quick’s interpretation didn’t rely on the public opinion data we collected during the pandemic, when we discovered that there was a third element to how the public reacts to public health crises, beyond complacency and panic: madness. Quick could not have known that a fairly large portion of the population (at least on social media) would react to a genuine threat to public health by ignoring common-sense protective measures and becoming outwardly hostile to anyone offering them. Or that those same people will later react to a potential future public health emergency as if it had already happened and was part of a sinister secret plan to depopulate the Earth. Honestly, how can you plan for this?
Who benefits from disease X conspiracy theories?
In keeping with the patterns of conspiracy theories in post-truth America, the Disease X hysteria is more than just another weird obsession for weirdos sitting at home. This was quickly used as a way to steal money from ignorant people. “Disinformation peddlers are trying to use this conspiracy theory to sell products,” Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta in Canada told AFP .
For example, The Wellness Company, which sells dietary supplements, states that “whether Disease X turns out to be a new COVID variant, Marburg virus, monkeypox, genetically engineered mosquitoes, or whatever else they come up with next,” you can prevent it with the company’s “Spike Support Formula.” pills. For just $64.99, you can get a bottle of tablets containing nattokinase and dandelion root, which will apparently prevent even hypothetical diseases. (For some reason, you may also want to take ivermectin.)
Conspiracy theorists will be right, but not in the way they think
Alex Jones will be right about Disease X. Not the globalist part, but the part where at some point in the future a deadly new virus or bacterial infection will emerge and spread through humanity, requiring another round of public health action from everyone peace. government.
This is how diseases have always worked, but there will be no doubt in the minds of conspiracy theorists that the new disease was created in a laboratory and is being used as a “kill shot” by the globalists, as predicted. They’ll be able to point to the WHO report and say, “See? They told us they were creating “Disease X” back in 2024, and here it is, and no, I will not take their fake vaccine. I’m fine with my dandelion root.” (Just imagine that rant being interrupted by several minutes of loud, tense coughing.)
Healthcare denial has real-world consequences beyond how annoying it is when conspiracy theorists think they’re right. Anti-vaccination propaganda has real victims. An unknown number of people could be alive today if they had (or could have been) vaccinated against COVID, and we are also seeing new outbreaks of measles in places where anti-vaccine conspiracy theories have taken root. Like Florida: The state’s vaccination rate for the disease is 92%, but the immunization threshold for preventing outbreaks is 95%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is why measles is surging in the state . This follows an easily recognizable pattern : as vaccination rates decline, measles rates rise.
Even more troubling is the official response: Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo did not advise parents to vaccinate their children or keep them in quarantine if they become infected. Instead, he wrote: “The Department of Health is transferring the authority to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance,” a move that many say could accelerate the outbreak and put children at risk, and which appears to signal a tacit endorsement of anti-vaxxer misconceptions .