Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, social media platforms began to flag, downgrade, or remove a range of posts that these companies said were spreading misinformation about the virus. Facebook’s list of COVID-related content that is subject to removal for violating its community standards is very long, from claims that the illness can be cured by herbal remedies to posts that say the vaccines contain microchips or are ineffective. In February 2021, the firm expanded its list to include any posts making claims that the virus was man-made or does not have a natural origin. Google likewise altered its auto-complete capability so that anyone typing in “coronavirus lab leak” or similar phrasing would not see their search query autofilled, whether via the search engine directly or its subsidiary YouTube, so as to not lead “people down pathways that we would find to be not authoritative information.”

This policing of what is acceptable and unacceptable to say was not limited to social media. Following accusations from the likes of Republican senator Tom Cotton in February 2020, as well as President Donald Trump’s predilection for calling COVID-19 “kung flu” and the “China virus,” an open letter from twenty-seven high-profile public health scientists was published in the Lancet, the prestigious British medical publication, denouncing the “rumours and misinformation” about the origin of the virus. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” they wrote. Researchers from multiple countries who had performed genomic analysis of SARS-CoV-2, they said, “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.”

The signatories further attempted to demonstrate this overwhelming scientific consensus by stating that the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and “the scientific communities they represent” had written a letter to the White House confirming the virus’s bat-derived origin, and that the director-general of the World Health Organization had issued a call to “promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.” The authors of the letter said that suggesting anything other than a natural origin of the disease did nothing “but create fear, rumours, and prejudice” and that, contrary to this, they were standing in solidarity with the science and health professionals of China.