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The Dixie Chicks make their triumphant return with the kiss-off anthem “Gaslighter”

14 years ago, country radio blacklisted the Dixie Chicks. Now they’re back.

By Constance Grady@constancegrady  Mar 4, 2020

Gaslighter” by the Dixie Chicks

The Dixie Chicks have just released their first new music since 2006. The band’s new single is called “Gaslighter,” and it dropped on Wednesday with an accompanying music video.

The term “gaslighter,” which comes from a 1944 film in which a man tries to convince his wife that she’s crazy, has become a politically charged term since the 2016 election. “Donald Trump is gaslighting America,” Lauren Duca wrote in a much-shared essay on Teen Vogue, arguing that Trump was trying to make Americans doubt their perception of reality.

But although the Dixie Chicks have long been a political band, the lyrics for their “Gaslighter” are more personal. They’re singing about that most archetypal of country song topics: a man who lied, cheated, and was generally up to no good. “Hollywood welcomed you with open doors; no matter what they gave you, you still wanted more,” sings lead singer Natalie Maines, in what appears to be a reference to her ex-husband, the actor Adrian Pasdar.

Personal or not, “Gaslighter” is political by its very existence. In releasing the song after 14 years without producing any new material, the Dixie Chicks are speaking back to the industry that discarded them long ago.

The group, who has 13 Grammys and whose four studio albums sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, was once the biggest act in country music. But then came the moment they came to call just “The Incident.”

In 2003, during the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Dixie Chicks were performing in London when lead singer Maines, who is from Texas, addressed the crowd. “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all,” Maines said. “We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”

Outraged supporters of George W. Bush called country radio stations and demanded that the Dixie Chicks be blacklisted. Country singer Toby Keith began performing in front of photoshopped projections of Maines cuddling with Saddam Hussein. (He later said he was “embarrassed” about that response.) Protesters held what CNN called a “Dixie chicken toss party” where they threw away Dixie Chick CDs, tapes, and concert tickets. The band received death threats.

Within a week, their single “Landslide” went from No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 to No. 43. Then it disappeared from the charts entirely.

At first, the Dixie Chicks reacted to their country music exile with equanimity. Maines told the German magazine Der Spiegel that the band no longer considered itself to be part of the country music scene, but instead part of “the big rock ‘n’ roll family.” In 2006, they released the defiant single “Not Ready to Make Nice,” and a documentary about the backlash they were facing called Shut Up and Sing.

The Incident came to take on a legendary status among country stars. In the Netflix documentary Miss Americana, released just last month, Taylor Swift cites what happened to the Dixie Chicks as the main reason she refused to talk about politics in public until 2018: Her management repeatedly told her that if she ever did, she would lose her country fan base.

And for a long while, it looked as though the Dixie Chicks would never fully recover. Their 2006 album Take the Long Way debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s pop charts and won the Grammy for Album of the Year, but country radio stations refused to play it. And ticket sales for the band’s accompanying tour were anemic.

In 2019, it became fashionable in certain corners of the internet to argue that while we’re continually wringing our hands over “cancel culture” today, the Dixie Chicks are the only group that’s ever actually had their careers ruined for expressing an opinion in public.

Take the Long Way would become the last new material the Dixie Chicks released for 14 years. While the group has intermittently toured since 2006 — and their 2015 US tour was a major hit — they haven’t created any more new material. Until now.

“Gaslighter” is the opening salvo of a band that was punished for its politics, at a moment in which music is often very political. So the question now isn’t whether the world will ever forgive the Dixie Chicks for what they said about Bush. It’s whether here in 2020, the rest of the world has caught up to where the Dixie Chicks were back in 2003.

Why pandemics activate xenophobia

The coronavirus is much more than a public health problem.

By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Mar 4, 2020

Shanghai Ballet dancers take safety precautions while in a training session at a dance studio amid the coronavirus outbreak in Shanghai, China, on March 2, 2020. Tang Yanjun/China News Service via Getty Images

The coronavirus outbreak, which emerged in China earlier this year, is quickly spreading across the world. We may not have reached full pandemic status yet, according to the World Health Organization, but we are inching closer every day as reports of new infections — in the US and elsewhere — stream in.

As legitimate concerns grow over the scope of the crisis, there’s another problem worth worrying about: xenophobia. The history of pandemics, as Columbia University assistant professor Merlin Chowkwanyun told Vox recently, is bound up with outbursts of fear-mongering and anti-immigration hysteria. This is no less true in the US, where concerns about infectious diseases have historically been linked to draconian restrictions on various groups, including Chinese Americans and African Americans.

The Trump administration, unsurprisingly, is considering imposing major restrictions at the US-Mexico border in response to the coronavirus, even though the virus isn’t coming from Mexico. And it’s not just what’s happening at the top. Chinese-owned businesses have been hit hard by coronavirus panic. As Jenny G. Zhang wrote in Eater, the panic has had a “decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric ‘others’ who bring with them dangerous, contagious diseases.”

And to that end, the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) recently issued a call asking reporters to “ensure accurate and fair portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans and to avoid fueling xenophobia and racism that have already emerged since the outbreak.”

Natalia Molina is a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on immigration, ethnicity, and how public health crises are often used to reinforce racial categories and advance nativist political movements.

I spoke to Molina by phone about the history of xenophobia and public health in the US, what pandemics — or the threat of pandemics — does to our politics, and the difficulties of balancing credible health concerns against the temptations to unfairly ostracize specific groups of people.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing

Why does a public health crisis, especially a pandemic, lend itself to exploitation by racist movements?
Natalia Molina

Well, it’s important to note upfront that we’ve always used race as an organizing principle to define problems in the economy, problems in the culture, problems in the political domain. When there’s a pandemic, or any kind of health crisis, our existing ideas about race naturally shape how we process and frame the situation.

So it’s not surprising that our ideas about race define who we think of as disease carriers, who we think is more susceptible to the disease, or which borders we think we should close. We can’t help but see these problems through the lens of race, because nearly everything in society gets processed through this lens one way or the other.

In this case, there are plenty of things we know about how to deal with this virus. We know to wash our hands, we know to stay home when we’re sick. But we tend to focus less on those practices than we do on pointing out people that we think are going to be more likely to be disease carriers.

At my own campus at USC, students that are Asian American but aren’t Chinese and don’t have any connection at all to the coronavirus are more likely to be seen as disease carriers. People are more ready to point out and stay away from people that look a certain way than they are to engage in the practices that they know will keep them healthy or will contribute to keeping them healthy.
Sean Illing

Is a wave of xenophobia the historical norm during epidemics?
Natalia Molina

It’s what we’ve seen over and over again. What may be a little surprising is that even when we have a better understanding of diseases and how to combat them, our reactions are still so malleable. Our perceptions are still distorted by our sociocultural biases.

So in the early 20th century, when we knew a good deal about how diseases operate, we still had different screening practices for Asians coming into the country through Angel Island on the West Coast. We had different screening practices for Mexicans coming through the US-Mexico border. We had different screening practices for European immigrants coming through Ellis Island on the East Coast.

Our views about race have always colored our views about who is safe or who is contaminated, or who is most likely to be a disease carrier or a disease spreader. The process for making these kinds of decisions has never been objective in the way we like to believe.
Sean Illing

It seems like the rhetoric of xenophobia is built into the way we talk about disease and public health. Or does it just appear that way because xenophobic movements have adopted the language of disease to target specific groups of people?
Natalia Molina

It’s a good question. It’s very hard to separate these things out. But the language of disease has always been linked to our discourse around immigration. For example, we saw this in 2014 with the Central American children who were coming to the United States in larger numbers than before. There was a congressman, Phil Gingrey of Georgia, who wrote a letter to the CDC saying that these children from Central America were bringing diseases like H1N1 and dengue fever and Ebola, without any hard evidence whatsoever.


So I think it’s pretty clear that our fears about immigrants and outsiders have always been bolstered by fears about disease and contamination.
Sean Illing

Do we have evidence showing that awareness of a virus activates xenophobic sentiments in people? Or are these associations implanted by outside forces?
Natalia Molina

The key thing is that when we already have negative representations of certain groups, when we already think of certain people as “dangerous” or “unworthy” or “outsiders,” then it’s much more likely that we’ll see them as disease carriers or as health burdens. This is what I mean when I say that our views about race frame the way we perceive public health threats.
Sean Illing

I have to assume that the more these racial biases influence our response to a threat like a virus, the worse the health outcomes are for everyone.
Natalia Molina

Absolutely. Think about it this way: If you’re afraid of getting sick and race is the organizing principle for how you view the disease, then you’re going to be more concerned about where you go and who you’re around rather than following standard health practices. And even more significantly, for those who feel targeted, they’re going to be less likely to speak out if they get sick or go get treatment. They’re going to be less likely to go to a free clinic and get vaccinated. They’re going to be less likely to report something that they’ve seen.

We saw this in Los Angeles when Proposition 187 was passed nearly 25 years ago. This was legislation that denied public services to undocumented immigrants, which many people said was dangerous because if you’re trying to stop the spread of communicable diseases, you want to make sure that people can still get vaccinated, that people still go to hospitals and get treated.

Even when that proposition was stayed by the courts, for a long period afterwards people were afraid to use public health clinics, even those that were documented, even those that had green cards, even those that were citizens, just for fear of being discriminated against. This is why we should all be invested in making sure that we do not see race as an interpretive framework for understanding disease and outbreaks.
Sean Illing

How can a government balance legitimate concerns about an epidemic against the temptation to overstate the risks or incite hysteria about a disempowered population?
Natalia Molina

We need to focus on behaviors and practices, not specific population groups. We need to talk about geographic zones, but we can’t map the disease onto certain bodies based on race and appearance — that’s not going to be helpful.

The Democratic Party’s risky bet on Biden

Picking Biden over Sanders might seem like the safe electability choice, but the Ukraine situation makes Biden much riskier than many believe.

By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Mar 4, 2020

Crossing his fingers for luck, Joe Biden meets California 

voters in Los Angeles, California, on March 3, 2020. 

Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

After Joe Biden’s big Super Tuesday wins, it’s obvious that he’s the Democratic frontrunner. And all of a sudden, Republicans are talking about Hunter Biden and Ukraine again — with Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) telling reporters on Wednesday that he plans to issue some kind of report on the matter in the coming months.

“These are questions that Joe Biden has not adequately answered,” Johnson said, per Politico. “And if I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.”

The Democratic elite has unified around Biden largely on the grounds of electability, that he’s more likely than chief rival Bernie Sanders to beat Trump in the general election. But Johnson’s comments underscore that Biden might not be nearly as safe on that front as either Democratic officials or voters think. They’re risking setting themselves up for a fall campaign mired in scandal and innuendo — a 2020 version of “Her Emails” that plays right into Trump’s “drain the swamp” narrative.

The Ukraine situation centered on the younger Biden’s position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. While Hunter was on the board, Biden was vice president — and was attempting to pressure Ukraine’s government to fire a prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as impeding anti-corruption efforts. Trump has tried to spin these two events into some kind of scandal in which the elder Biden was working to protect the company that employed his son from a crusading prosecutor.

Trump’s allegation is obviously false and deeply ironic, given that the president himself got impeached for improperly pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden over this issue. But the mere fact that there’s no actual scandal here doesn’t mean the perception of one won’t hurt Biden.

One of Trump’s chief political talents is attracting extraordinary amounts of credulous media attention to his bizarre theories, in ways that end up creating a stench of corruption around his opponents. One of Biden’s central rationales for running against Trump is restoring dignity and honor to the White House, an argument that could be undermined in the public’s eye by even the whiff of scandal. Hillary’s emails were a fake problem too — right up until they torpedoed 2016’s “safer than Bernie” choice.

Sanders certainly has electability problems, most notably turning off moderates who might be willing to vote for a less extreme not-Trump. But it’s just not obvious that Biden is the clearly safer choice, especially given what we saw four years ago. He may not be uniquely risky compared to the rest of the field, but it’s also not clear that he’s as electable as most Democrats seem to think he is.

The party needs to grapple with this openly before concluding that he’s their only option.
What really happened with the Bidens and Ukraine

The Hunter Biden situation involves a lot of names from mid-2010s Ukrainian politics that you, dear reader, may be forgiven for not remembering. Luckily, my colleague Matt Yglesias has a very helpful guide to it. Here’s the key background:

Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent qualifications for the job except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

He got paid up to $50,000 per month for the job and the situation constituted the kind of conflict of interest that was normally considered inappropriate in Washington until the Trump era. These days, of course, the president of the United States regularly accepts payments from foreign sources to his company while in office, and so do the Trump children. The Obama administration probably should have done something about this at the time, but the White House couldn’t literally force Hunter not to accept the job. And given the larger family context, you can see why Joe might have been reluctant to confront his son about it.

This would all be a small footnote in history except that by 2016, officials throughout the Obama administration and in Western Europe had come to a consensus that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption. Biden, as he later colorfully recounted, delivered the message that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired.

There was nothing remotely controversial about this at the time. No congressional Republicans complained about it, and the European Union hailed the decision to fire Shokin. The reason there is video footage of Biden touting his personal role in this is it was considered a foreign policy triumph that Biden wanted to claim credit for, not anything sordid or embarrassing.

But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent. So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.

There are two conclusions to draw from this set of facts.

First, Hunter Biden got his job with Burisma because he was Joe Biden’s son. This is both a troubling statement about the elite-driven corruption of capitalism and meritocracy as well as a window into Biden’s political liabilities. Trump’s self-dealing and nepotism are obvious weak points, but he can parry Biden’s attacks on that front by citing Hunter.

Second, Joe Biden’s conduct toward Shokin had nothing to do with his son — and everyone at the time knew it. The only person saying otherwise was Shokin, who seems to quite obviously have been lying to preserve his own reputation.

Trump’s allegation of wrongdoing by Biden is merely a warmed-over version of Shokin’s self-interested complaint. It’s obviously, risibly false.

But electorally speaking, it’s far from clear how much that matters.
The case for worrying about Biden’s electability

Trump’s various claims about Clinton’s use of a private mail server were absurd. Yet that didn’t stop mainstream media from obsessing over them.

Part of the problem is the entrenched commitment to portraying “both sides” of a story among mainstream media reporters. Another is the inherent limitations of cable news and traditional news article, which are ill-suited for conveying complex realities. Some reporters have even, at times, seem genuinely convinced that there’s some scandal in Biden’s behavior.

For all these reasons, it’s entirely likely that Trump’s conspiracy theories will get at least some of the same credulous coverage they got last time around.

A phone call transcript between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is projected during the House Intelligence Committee hearing on the impeachment inquiry of President Trump on November 19, 2019. Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

The post-impeachment polling on this issue suggests that segments of the public are vulnerable on this issue. A mid-February Politico-Morning Consult poll found that 30 percent of independent voters were “less likely” to support Biden as a result of the controversy, while only 5 percent were “more likely” (41 percent said it made no difference). Twelve percent of Democrats said that it made them less likely to support the former Vice President as well.

Make no mistake: Trump, Republicans, and the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh cinematic universe are salivating at the prospect of talking about Hunter Biden, Ukraine, and Washington corruption for the next few months.

In between the end of Trump’s impeachment in early February and the South Carolina primary at the end of the month, we heard virtually nothing about Ukraine or Burisma. Yet on Monday, when it became clear that Biden’s surge was real, Sen. Johnson announced that he wants to subpoena Hunter Biden to testify about Burisma. As with his Wednesday comments about a report on Burisma, the timing couldn’t be more transparent.


You can’t expect impartiality from the executive branch either, to put it mildly.

Trump has already attempted to pressure Ukraine to open an investigation into Biden, even going so far as to potentially violate the law by holding up military aid to Kyiv. In the midst of this scandal, he openly called on China to investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings in that country. He has an attorney general in Bill Barr who is demonstrably willing to bend the Justice Department to his will.

There are all sorts of different ways — policy levers foreign and domestic, an entire media infrastructure beholden to him — that Trump can go in an effort to make Biden look shady. And it seems, judging from some of his recent behavior, that the impeachment acquittal has convinced Trump that he’s untouchable.

Joe Biden’s campaign bounced back after a strong win in South Carolina and cruised to further wins across the country on Super Tuesday. Ronen Tivony/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

The fact that Joe Biden himself didn’t do anything wrong is, unfortunately for him, somewhat immaterial. What matters is creating a cloud of scandal and corruption around the Democratic nominee. That was enough to do serious damage to Clinton; it could potentially do the same to Biden.

To be sure, it’s not foreordained that such a faux scandal would sink his campaign. Clinton did have more baggage coming into the 2016 election than Biden does heading into 2020. Trump’s baseless accusations might be less effective the second time around.

It’s also fair to note that if Sanders were the nominee, the Republicans would also find something to tar him with. His wife Jane has legal problems surrounding her time as president of a small Vermont college, for example, that Republican-aligned media has already started probing.

But Jane Sanders was not a key figure in a national debate over impeachment, and so attacks on her may not resonate as much. Besides, Biden is explicitly running as the person who’ll restore dignity to the White House in a way Sanders isn’t — a message that is more vulnerable to the relentless drumbeat of Hunter Biden “bombshells” from Fox News and partisan Republican investigators on the Hill and credulous coverage from the mainstream press.

Choosing Biden means betting that this won’t play out as poorly as it could — on a particular theory, in other words, of how the public will react to the inevitable Republican deluge of Hunter Biden smears. It’s not obvious that we should have more certainty about the Biden theory of electorate than the Sanders one — that voters will be deaf to Republican efforts to paint him as an authoritarian communist.

If they do settle on Biden, Democrats may well go into the November election much like they did in the 2016 election: with an increasingly unpopular Democratic candidate hobbled by accusations of corruption. The worry is that Democrats haven’t thought through this possibility as they make their decision in the primary — that their safe choice to run against Trump might not be as safe as they think he is.

The conspiracy theories about the origins of the coronavirus, debunked

Rumor is the coronavirus started in a Chinese lab. 

Here’s how we know it didn’t.

By Eliza Barclay@elizabarclayeliza.barclay@vox.com Mar 4, 2020

Workers inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, in 2017. Conspiracy theorists have conjectured the lab is the origin of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak; scientific evidence shows it’s not. AFP via Getty Images

The signs that the small, scattered coronavirus outbreak in the United States could spiral into a larger-scale problem are growing. A new analysis, first reported by STAT, found there are likely now 500 to 600 (mostly undetected) cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in Washington state alone. “January 1 in Wuhan was March 1 in Seattle,” computational biologist Trevor Bedford, who did the analysis, told STAT, referring to the Chinese city where the virus emerged and began rapidly infecting humans.

The decisions federal and local public health officials make this week — to test more people with symptoms, inform the public about the risk, isolate the sick, and institute other measures — will be crucial. So will the speed at which they execute them.

This could be a make-or-break moment where US cases remain relatively low and dispersed, or explode in the coming weeks, like they did in Wuhan in January.

Meanwhile, on Fox News and social media, a dangerous conspiracy theory about the origin of the health crisis won’t die.

There are two main versions of the rumor, and they have one common thread: that the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, originated in a level 4 (the highest biosafety level) research laboratory in Wuhan.

In one version of the rumor, the virus was engineered in the lab by humans as a bioweapon. In another version, the virus was being studied in the lab (after being isolated from animals) and then “escaped” or “leaked” because of poor safety protocol.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a real place, and the exact origin of the novel coronavirus is still a mystery, with researchers racing since the outbreak began to figure it out. But already, virologists who’ve parsed the genome and infectious disease experts who study coronaviruses have more than enough evidence to show that the virus is brand new and came from nature, not the Wuhan lab. A large group of them, citing genome analyses from multiple countries, recently affirmed in The Lancet that the virus originated in wildlife.

The emergence of the virus in the same city as China’s only level 4 biosafety lab, it turns out, is pure coincidence.

Conspiratorial claims about the Wuhan lab are circulating on cable news and social media

Before we get to debunking, let’s note who is spreading rumors about the origins of the virus.

First, several prominent US conservative pundits and politicians — known to regularly spew nonsense (and bash China) — have been politicizing the bioweapon rumor for weeks.

“It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized,” right-wing radio host and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh said of the virus on February 24. “All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has repeatedly suggested before Congress and on Fox News that the virus could have come from the lab.

The Arkansas senator furthered “infodemic” by pushing debunked claim that the novel coronavirus may have been created in a Wuhan laboratory. https://t.co/oJvVzjOyxw— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) March 1, 2020

On Monday, former White House strategist Steve Bannon went on Fox News to defend Cotton and imply that the Chinese Communist Party was still hiding something about the origin of Covid-19. “The mainstream media and far left [are] saying, ‘Oh, he’s a conspiracy theorist,”’ Bannon said. ”All he’s saying: It’s incumbent upon the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi [Jinping] to come out and give all information ... this is all Cotton’s saying.”

In the New York Post, Steven Mosher, a regular critic of China’s population control measures, has stoked the leakage rumor, using an array of circumstantial clues that Chinese labs’ handling of deadly pathogens can’t be trusted.

Similar rumors have also been running rampant in online forums in China. The South China Morning Post on February 20 debunked yet another rumor of the virus escaping from the lab in China:

More rumours swirled online over the weekend, this time that [Wuhan Institute of Virology] researcher Chen Quanjiao had reported the head of the institute, Wang Yanyi, claiming she had “sold experimental animals” to the live animal and seafood market and “leaked the virus” from the lab.

But Chen denied the claim, saying she was angry that her name had been used to fabricate information. “The recent rumours about the institute have affected the researchers as they try to tackle key problems,” Chen said in a statement.

The scientific evidence disproving these rumors matters because the conspiracy theory could persist and undermine trust in public health authorities at this critical moment. As the Washington Post reported Sunday, the rumor that the virus came from a Chinese lab is one reason residents of one Alabama county are currently unnerved and distrustful of the response to Covid-19 in their state.

“Conspiracy theories about manmade viruses are not new. We saw this with HIV — the rumor that the US made it and introduced it into Africa. But they are really dangerous kinds of things to get spread around,” Gerald Keusch, a professor of medicine and international health and associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, told Vox.

So let’s walk through what we know about the virus, and why it’s time to put the lab rumor to rest.

The virus originated in bats and then jumped to humans, perhaps through other animals

Soon after the Chinese government acknowledged there was an outbreak of a mysterious new virus in late December in Wuhan, scientists raced to sequence its genome. By mid-January, they had it and shared it with the World Health Organization.

Soon after that, scientists saw that the virus closely resembled viruses that circulate in bats. “If you look at the genetic sequence of the virus, it’s closely related to a bat virus, about 96 percent the same,” Jim LeDuc, head of the Galveston National Laboratory, a level 4 biosafety lab in Texas, told Vox. “There’s been talk about a pangolin intermediate host; that’s probably not true.”

Chinese officials also reported that several of the first cluster of cases had ties to a live animal market where both seafood and other wildlife were sold as food. (The market has since been closed.) The market soon became the leading hypothesis for how the virus made the leap into humans, where it’s been able to spread efficiently ever since.

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The genetic evidence and epidemiological information, according to three esteemed infectious disease researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, “implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in China’s live-animal markets.”

According to a genome analysis by Tanja Stadler from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel, the virus first began transmitting in humans in China as early as the first half of November 2019.

“The widespread hypothesis that the first person was infected at an animal market in November is still plausible,” Stadler said in a statement. “Our data effectively rule out the scenario that the virus circulated in humans for a long time before that.”

LeDuc agrees with the hypothesis that the animal market played a role in the virus jumping to humans. “The linkage back to the market is pretty realistic, and consistent with what we saw with SARS,” said LeDuc. “It’s a perfectly plausible and logical explanation: The virus exists in nature and, jumping hosts, finds that it like humans just fine, thank you.“

Unfortunately, there’s a long history of these “spillover” events, where an emerging disease jumps from wildlife to humans, turning into a pandemic. And scientists say we should expect them with more travel, trade, connectivity, urbanization, climate change, and ecological destruction, if we don’t stop the drivers.

What researchers have to figure out now is how exactly the coronavirus jumped to humans: perhaps through a human eating an infected animal, or through humans being exposed to infected feces or urine. “All we know [is] its likely distant source was bats, but we don’t know who was between bats and people,” said Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia and host of the This Week in Virology podcast. “It could be a direct infection [between bats and humans] as well.”

A preliminary scientific paper shows this is a genuinely new virus, and there’s no way it could have been engineered by humans

In a recent podcast episode, Racaniello discussed with two other researchers a fascinating preprint paper (that’s currently under peer review, according to the authors) about the virus origin. The key finding: that SARS-CoV-2 is “not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus.”

The paper, which was uploaded onto Virological.org in February, is written by several leading microbiologists who closely examined the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

Specifically, they found the unusual biochemical features of the virus could only have come about two ways after the virus jumped from animal to humans, or what’s called zoonotic transfer. The ways, they write, are: “1) natural selection in a non-human animal host prior to zoonotic transfer, and 2) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.”

In other words, nature came up with these weird characteristics in the genome, either in an intermediary animal between bats and people or in humans after the virus infected one. As Racaniello put it on his podcast: “Humans could never have dreamed this up.”

What’s more, he noted, no known lab anywhere in the world was working on a coronavirus like this one, and its closest relative is a bat virus found in a cave in 2013 in Yunnan, China, 1,000 miles from Wuhan.“Presumably there’s a common ancestor, most likely from a bat or an intermediary animal that was contaminated by that bat,” Racaniello says.
The coronavirus would be a bad bioweapon

Several experts told me the theory that the virus was meant to be a bioweapon doesn’t make sense, either. One big reason: Covid-19 isn’t all that deadly or transmissible, compared to other potential pathogens out there.

“To make it as a bioweapon, if that’s what you wanted to do, there are scarier and more virulent pathogens to work with,” said Keusch of Boston University.

For instance, Ebola and the West African Lassa virus are deadly threats that can only be studied in biosafety level 4 labs, like Wuhan. Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever is a tick-borne disease that has a death rate of 30 to 50 percent. The global death rate for Covid-19, meanwhile, is around 3 percent at the moment, but it’s expected to come down dramatically as more cases are discovered in the coming weeks. And even now, it varies widely by country and region.

Simply put, if you wanted to release a bioweapon to kill a lot of people, there are much deadlier pathogens you could use.
The Wuhan lab has the same safety protocols as top biosafety labs in the US and Europe

In his article in the New York Post, Mosher suggests that we shouldn’t trust the officials who ran the Wuhan lab. “It sure sounds like China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong, doesn’t it?” he says.

I asked LeDuc, who runs the Galveston biocontainment lab, if he has any experience with the Wuhan lab. Turns out he has a lot. He and his colleagues have worked for six years with the Chinese team there, both in advising them on building their lab and keeping it safe, and on scientific collaboration. “I can tell you that lab in Wuhan is equivalent to any lab here in the US and Europe,” he said.

For instance, many labs now use radio waves to track and inventory vials containing dangerous pathogens.

Keusch agrees. “I don’t think there’s any likelihood that the lab is less prepared in terms of protocol and capability than any lab in the US. It’s really good, though nothing is perfect,” he said.

The rumors have also reportedly hurt the lab’s ability to do its work.

“The rumours … have caused severe damage to our researchers who have been dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing during the epidemic,” the lab said in a statement, according to the South China Morning Post.

Why we need to figure out all the details of where the virus came from

According to Bruce Aylward, an epidemiologist who led the World Health Organization’s recent mission to China to assess its Covid-19 response, the investigation into where and how the virus jumped to people is ongoing. The focus remains on the (now closed) Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, the wildlife market inside it, and other area markets.

“Ever since SARS, the market authorities now have to record which animals are sold by whom and where they come from in these markets. So now there’s a list of 10 vendors from seven provinces,” he told my colleague Julia Belluz in a recent interview. “Then China’s CDC can do a case control study based on where in the market these animals were.”

The focus in the past month has been on saving lives, he said, but as new cases and deaths decline, the investigators will eventually be able to turn back to getting animal info from the market vendors and testing the animals.

Racaniello says it’s critical that the source is identified to eliminate the chance that the virus is introduced into people again.

For LeDuc, China’s experience with the coronavirus should be a clear message of the great public health threat live animal markets post.

“The reason we’re seeing [coronaviruses like SARS and SARS-CoV-2 emerge] in China is they have these live animal markets, where they bring in animals alive and co-house them, one cage on top of another, where there’s an opportunity for transmission between atypical hosts,” says LeDuc.

We’ll need to be patient for Chinese investigators to get to the bottom of how the virus made the jump from animals to humans. In the meantime, remember that in a public health crisis, conspiracy theories are a distraction. Rather, it’s our collective responsibility to stay focused on keeping each other safe.

Facebook doubles down on removing coronavirus conspiracy theories

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok are all battling misinformation related to the novel coronavirus.

By Shirin Ghaffary and Rebecca Heilweil Updated Mar 4, 2020


By late February, coronavirus cases were spreading quickly throughout Europe, and new hoaxes followed. Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images

Social media companies are increasing their vigilance about removing coronavirus conspiracies. Facebook, in particular, continues to update its policies as the outbreak — and corresponding disinformation — spreads.

On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg reiterated in a Facebook post that the platform was removing conspiracy theories related to the coronavirus that have been flagged by global health organizations, in addition to labeling coronavirus misinformation with “fact check” labels to let users know that such content had been rated false. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is providing the World Health Organization (WHO) “as many free ads as they need.” At the same time, Zuckerberg said the company will block ads that try to exploit the situation, such as those that claim a product has a miracle cure for the Covid-19 disease.

It’s been more than two months since a novel strain of coronavirus popped up in Wuhan, China, and proceeded to spread to countries across the world. And as that’s happened, panic has continued to disseminate throughout social media, forcing tech platforms to grapple with what the World Health Organization is calling an “infodemic.”

As of March 4, the novel coronavirus linked to Wuhan, China, has infected nearly 95,000 people, mostly in mainland China, and there are cases popping up throughout the United States. More than 3,200 people have died, though researchers at Johns Hopkins tracking the disease also report more than 51,000 recoveries from the illness.

With more and more people searching online for information about the coronavirus outbreak, they can easily encounter a barrage of misleading and potentially dangerous information. And the WHO, which has also released its own “myth-busting” resources, is warning that misinformation about the novel coronavirus has caused harmful stigmatization and discrimination. In the US, for instance, there is a growing number of reports about misinformation fueling racism against Asian Americans.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok have all told Recode that they’ve been working to promote factual content and some are limiting the reach of posts with misinformation on their platforms. Twitter, for instance, has put a warning label linking to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) when users search “coronavirus.” Meanwhile, the WHO has now joined TikTok in an effort to boost accurate information about the illness, and several of those companies met with the public health organization at Facebook back in February.


The CDC and the WHO recommend several basic measures to help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases such as Covid-19:

DO
Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
Cover your cough or sneeze with a tissue, then throw the tissue in the trash.
Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces using a regular household cleaning spray or wipe.
Stay home when you are sick; contact your health care provider immediately if you think you’ve been exposed to Covid-19.

DON’T
Touch your face, particularly your eyes, nose, or mouth.
Travel if you have a fever and cough.
Wear a face mask if you are well. Face masks should be used by people who show symptoms of Covid-19 to help prevent the spread of the disease to others.

Information on the coronavirus outbreak, including its severity, may change as it spreads. Find answers to common questions here, and stay up to date with Vox’s coverage here.

Still, efforts by these social media platforms have not managed to stop the spread of misleading or outright false hoaxes about the outbreak in the form of posts and videos that have racked up thousands of clicks, “Likes,” and shares. A significant amount of false information about the coronavirus is also spreading on private channels. Take WhatsApp, for instance. As the Washington Post reported, the encrypted platform has seen a flurry of wrong information about the coronavirus, creating panic among its users throughout the world.

Another problem involves politicians promoting the idea that the coronavirus is a hoax or spreading other conspiracy theories about the virus. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Recode that the company would remove false claims and conspiracy theories flagged by world health organizations that have been shared by politicians or elected officials.

While we’re seeing a wide variety of false coronavirus posts across these platforms, it’s still hard to say how widespread the misinformation problem is. But it’s significant enough that well-regarded institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, research centers in England, and even NASA have had to issue statements or comments debunking claims that have been floated online. Advocacy groups such as Media Matters have also been busy tracking down false and misleading posts.

Although there is a seemingly endless stream of sources spreading misinformation about the Wuhan coronavirus around the web, we’ve identified and debunked a few of the most pervasive hoaxes.
False: The novel coronavirus sickness is caused by 5G

On social media, some are pushing the idea that the novel coronavirus was caused by or can be linked to deployment of 5G technology in Wuhan, China. There are several “strains” of this theory floating around online. One premise is that 5G technology can weaken the immune system and make the common cold more virulent. Another promotes the idea that the 5G technology itself is causing the symptoms that have been attributed to the novel coronavirus. One version of the theory pushes the idea that the technology absorbs oxygen in the lungs, which “causes coronavirus.”

That idea has been flagged false by a UK-based third-party fact-checker, called Full Fact, that works with Facebook. There’s no evidence that 5G impacts the immune system, and no proof that it has any link to the novel coronavirus.
False: There’s a plot to “exterminate” people infected with the new coronavirus

On social media, some have floated the claim that China sought permission from the country’s Supreme Court to kill people infected with the novel coronavirus. Several fact-checkers, including Snopes, have determined these reports to be false and to have originated from a website with several “red flags.”
An account with more than 30,000 followers share this false theory.

Poynter observed that some social media accounts continue to push the idea that China is planning to kill people with the illness. Meanwhile, some accounts have floated that the idea that the incineration of human bodies is causing an excess of sulfur dioxide, which they imply can be seen from satellite images. There is no evidence that any of this is true, and a research meteorologist from NASA told the UK fact-checking organization Full Fact that the images these theories are based on aren’t live satellite data.

“Although satellite data has been used in the construction of the emission inventories, these emissions do not account for the day-to-day variations in SO2 emissions and as such cannot account for sudden changes in human activity,” Arlindo M. da Silva told the fact-checking organization.
False: Scientists have proven that humans got the novel coronavirus from eating bats

One prominent theory is that the coronavirus spread through human consumption of bats. BuzzFeed reported that a prominent video about the novel coronavirus in Hindi that’s attracted more than 13 million amplified the claim that eating bats caused the coronavirus outbreak. This theory, which has popped up throughout social media, is also linked to unfounded speculation that the coronavirus was started at the Wuhan Virology Institute.

Those claims have helped fuel racism against people of Chinese descent, and Asian people more broadly, throughout the world.

YouTube

It’s true that there has been research into a potential link between bats and the coronavirus, but it’s important to be very cautious in interpreting the findings. First, there is no evidence that eating bats caused the coronavirus outbreak. And Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian and an epidemiologist EcoHealth Alliance, told Vox earlier this month that it’s “still not known” whether this outbreak started with bats at an animal market.

“It’s clear there was some environmental contamination in the market that includes this virus. And that’s what we know so far. So it’s likely that people were infected in that market,” Epstein told Vox. “But I think there is still some question about how the earlier cases may have been exposed.”

And here’s what the CDC reports: “Analysis of the genetic tree of this virus indicates it originated in bats, but whether the virus jumped directly from bats or whether there was an intermediary animal host is not, yet, known.”
False: Scientists predicted the virus will kill 65 million people

In October 2019, a Johns Hopkins research center ran an “exercise” that aimed to model the global response to a potential epidemic. Many people online have misinterpreted the study and erroneously linked its predictions to the possible death toll of an outbreak similar to what we’re currently witnessing with the novel coronavirus. In other words, the Johns Hopkins study had nothing to do with the coronavirus, although the scenario studied might seem similar. 


This is a popular line of misinformation on Twitter. There are several tweets, including one that’s still up with over 140,000 “likes,” claiming that scientists have predicted that the Wuhan coronavirus will kill 65 million people. That’s not accurate.

“We modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction,” the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said in a statement. “We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people.”
False: China built a biological weapon that was leaked from a lab in Wuhan

Right now, it’s not clear where this new strain of coronavirus originated. Officials believe it may be linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, but scientists still aren’t exactly sure how or where it developed.

On social media, however, there are many other completely unproven theories about its origin that imply the outbreak of the virus may be linked to bioweapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institute that houses the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. This Facebook post that’s been shared more than 4,000 times says that it’s “believed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is where the disease may have originated.”
Screenshot from the “Behold Israel” account, which implies that the Wuhan-linked coronavirus may have originated at a biosafety laboratory in Wuhan.

This idea appears to be based, in part, on comments a former Israeli military officer shared with the Washington Times, a right-wing outlet whose past articles have suggested that President Barack Obama might be Muslim and have spread conspiracy theories. Back in January Jim Banks, a Republican congressman from Indiana, even tweeted out a link to the Washington Times article. His tweet has been shared more than 1,000 times. (Rep. Banks did not respond to a request for comment.) And this month, Sen. Tom Cotton also amplified similar speculations.

As shocking as the biowarfare lab theory might be, experts have told the Washington Post that there’s no evidence to support it. And the lab itself said in a statement that misinformation had “caused severe damage to our researchers who have been dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing during the epidemic.”

False: Chinese spies smuggled the virus out of Canada

Social media posts are pushing the unproven premise that the novel coronavirus found in Wuhan was smuggled from a lab in Canada as part of China’s clandestine quest for a bioweapon, a theory debunked by Politifact. It’s a theory that seems to be somewhat related to the Wuhan lab conspiracy. One tweet by Republican Party official Solomon Yue, who has more than 100,000 followers, said: “#coronavirus is stolen from Canada by espionage & sent to Wuhan to be weaponized to kill foreign enemies.”

#coronavirus is stolen from Canada by espionage & sent to Wuhan to be weaponized to kill foreign enemies. Now the deadly weaponized virus kills 80 Chinese & no foreigners & becomes Emperor Shithole's Chernobyl! https://t.co/aOyIbvmC39— Solomon Yue (@SolomonYue) January 27, 2020

Although a Chinese researcher working in Canada is under investigation for a possible policy breach after she was invited to the Wuhan lab twice a year for two years, according to Politifact, there’s “no evidence” to support the claim that she “stole coronavirus samples and gave them to the Wuhan lab to create biological weapons.”

False: A coronavirus vaccine already exists

Another popular theory is that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus already exists, and some are even suggesting that the vaccine was previously patented. While researchers in several countries are working to develop a vaccine, no such vaccine has yet been developed, according to FactCheck.org and Politifact. But this hasn’t stopped people from going online and claiming otherwise.

A recent post on Facebook claims that the coronavirus was a “set up” to sell vaccines and includes screenshots claiming to show a patent for a new vaccine. In this particular case, because Facebook’s fact-checkers verified the post as containing false information, a handful of “related articles” show up below the post, pointing users to verified sites that debunk the vaccine conspiracy theory. If you try to share the post, Facebook issues a warning stating that independent fact-checkers have said it contains false information.

But even though Facebook has placed warnings on some vaccine hoaxes related to the Wuhan coronavirus, the content isn’t flagged as false on every platform. On Twitter, for example, one tweet that’s gained close to 2,000 “likes” suggests that a vaccine for the coronavirus is owned by the Pirbright Institute, an English infectious disease research institute that focuses on farm animals.

This claim is false. The Pirbright Institute issued a statement shared by FactCheck.org, clarifying that its researchers don’t work with human coronaviruses, and that a patent that they hold is unrelated to the current coronavirus linked to Wuhan.

Some have also attempted to profit from spreading the false information that’s there’s a cure (there’s none yet), and the Federal Trade Commission warned the public earlier this month that “scammers are taking advantage of fears” about the illness and “setting up websites to sell bogus products, and using fake emails, texts, and social media posts as a ruse to take your money and get your personal information.
False: There were 100,000 confirmed cases in January

As of March 4, there were nearly 95,000 cases of the coronavirus, but at the very end of January, when that number was less than 10,000, people were vastly inflating the number of infected people beyond what any official source has reported.

It’s an important reminder that, when trying to figure out the scale of the virus’s spread, it’s worth looking to reputable, official sources, such as the World Health Organization. The Center for Systems Science and Engineer at Johns Hopkins also maintains a useful map documenting the number of confirmed cases throughout the world.

It’s true that on January 26, one public health expert told the Guardian, however, “Almost certainly many tens of thousands of people are infected.” He added, “My best guess now is perhaps 100,000 cases right now.” But that big scary number can be misleading because it was a guess and that number had not been confirmed.
A video on YouTube that claims to portray a nurse in Wuhan, China, who is transcribed as saying that 90,000 are now infected with the new coronavirus.

Nevertheless, many popular posts on social platforms spread statistics that served to scare people with numbers that do not match the official count. Some of these posts cite medical workers in Wuhan, without evidence. For instance, one YouTube video posted on January 25 shows someone identified as a nurse, who says there were as many as 90,000 people infected with the disease in China alone.

Similarly, in late January on Twitter, an account disguised as a news outlet shared an audio clip that claimed that the time, 100,000 people have been infected.

It’s worth noting that there’s legitimate doubt about whether the Chinese government is accurately reporting the extent of the virus’ impact. At least eight people have been arrested by the Chinese government for spreading hoaxes, according to reporting from the Poynter Institute in January. On the popular Chinese social media app WeChat, some have said that frontline reports by medical workers are being taken down.

Still, the exact number of people infected by the coronavirus remains unknown.
False: A teen on TikTok is the first case in Canada

On TikTok, some teenagers have pretended to be infected with the virus. One student in Vancouver posted a popular video falsely claiming his friend had the first Canadian confirmed case of coronavirus. The video showed a teenager vomiting in school trash cans and wearing a mask around campus. In an interview with the Daily Beast, a spokesperson for the British Columbia Department of Health confirmed that the video is fake. At the time, the only confirmed case of coronavirus in British Columbia, at the time of the video was posted, was a man in his 40s. 

A screenshot of one of the TikTok coronavirus videos that was taken down.

TikTok appears to have deleted the original viral video which had over 4.1 million views, but a similar video, posted by the same user, showed a teen alleging a classmate had contracted the virus remained up as of February 20. That morning, the company said it released a feature directing users to trusted sources of information, like the WHO, when they search for coronavirus-related content in the app.

False: The Chinese government built a hospital overnight

It’s worth noting that the Chinese state media has also been spreading false information. As BuzzFeed News first pointed out, two state media outlets — Global Times and People’s Daily — circulated an image of a newly constructed building and claimed it was a hospital in Wuhan that was constructed in just 16 hours. In fact, the building in the image was an apartment building more than 600 miles away.


This is just one example of how the Chinese government and state-backed organizations have used false or misleading information to portray the outbreak as being under control.
How tech platforms are responding

Every social media company Recode reached said they were working to reduce the impact of false information about the coronavirus in some way, to varying extents.

In addition to taking down conspiracy theories and provided WHO free advertising, Facebook said it’s also working on “blocking people from running ads that try to exploit the situation.” Zuckerberg said, as an example, that would include a company promoting a product that claimed to cure a disease. He also said,: “Researchers are already using aggregated and anonymized Facebook data — including mobility data and population density maps — to better understand how the virus is spreading.

In a statement, Twitter appeared to echo some of the latest steps being taken by Facebook. The company said it would “halt any attempt by advertisers to opportunistically use the Covid-19 outbreak to target inappropriate ads,” that it was working with fact checkers to promote accurate content on the site, and that it was also supplying data to researchers.

Twitter also said it’s not “seeing significant coordinated platform manipulation efforts around these issues.” This doesn’t mean that there’s not false information about coronavirus on Twitter, as the hoaxes we mentioned earlier prove. Twitter’s response simply indicates that the company hasn’t found any evidence of intentional disinformation campaigns by someone, like a state actor or political group.

In the early days of the outbreak, Facebook’s approach was to put fact-checking alerts on false content related to conspiracy theories. But at the end of January, the company announced that it would take additional action:

We will also start to remove content with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities that could cause harm to people who believe them. We are doing this as an extension of our existing policies to remove content that could cause physical harm. We’re focusing on claims that are designed to discourage treatment or taking appropriate precautions. This includes claims related to false cures or prevention methods — like drinking bleach cures the coronavirus — or claims that create confusion about health resources that are available. We will also block or restrict hashtags used to spread misinformation on Instagram, and are conducting proactive sweeps to find and remove as much of this content as we can.

Twitter has also placed a warning label linking to the CDC when users search “coronavirus.”Twitter shows a banner linking to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when you search for “coronavirus” on the platform.

Meanwhile, starting in late January, TikTok began issuing a notification for users when they search for the “coronavirus” hashtag in the app. The alert encourages users to look to “trusted sources” like the WHO for accurate information and to report content that might violate its community guidelines. TikTok told Recode in a statement that its guidelines “do not permit misinformation that could cause harm to our community or the larger public,” adding that “[w]hile we encourage our users to have respectful conversations about the subjects that matter to them, we remove deliberate attempts to misrepresent authoritative sources of news.”

YouTube has its own version of an advisory. Beginning in late January, the video platform began showing short previews of text-based news articles about the coronavirus in search results. If you search “coronavirus” on YouTube, for example, you’re linked to a WHO landing page about the novel coronavirus. YouTube told Recode that false information generally does not violate the platform’s rules unless it involves hate speech, harassment, scams, or inciting violence. The company also said it aims to reduce the recommendations of what it deems “borderline content” or videos that could misinform users in harmful ways — including false information about coronavirus.

Despite these efforts, it’s seemingly impossible for these platforms to take down every false coronavirus post as soon as one pops up. As with any kind of misinformation, it’s a game of never-ending whack-a-mole. But the continued prevalence of false info about the outbreak, one month into its existence, shows how essential it is to contain the spread of misinformation, especially with serious health consequences involved.

Update March 4: This post has updated throughout with more examples of hoaxes as well as new information on the outbreak and tech company responses.