It’s hard to describe the study of viruses in pets and farm animals as glamorous work. It is serious and necessary work, and the Pirbright Institute in Surrey, England, is dedicated to it. But it has also become a target for conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists – in this case, those who accuse former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates of orchestrating the coronavirus pandemic – have included veterinarians and virologists in their conspiracy model. This is no joke – letters and phone calls with threats and insults have begun to arrive at the Institute. “We have never seen anything like this before. Some of the messages were very aggressive. For example, they called us murderers,” said Teresa Mohan, director of public relations for the Pirbright Institute. One call stands out in her mind. It was not the first time the person had called, and after one such call, the employee who was talking to him burst into tears. He shouted into the phone that the institute had created the coronavirus and was using it as a biological weapon. “He then called me and pretended to be a woman, like in the movie Mrs. Doubtfire. It was clear that the person had changed their voice. They said something nasty with a sexual undertone, and of course I hung up,” Mohan recalls.
According to Teresa Mohan, serious threats were made against the employees. It all started in January, when a false message appeared on social networks. Its author, video blogger Jordan Sather, promoted a conspiracy theory that US President Donald Trump was planning to expose a global network of child sexual exploitation allegedly involving his political opponents. Seth has posted several messages on Twitter linking the Pirbright Institute to a “patent on coronaviruses” that was issued in 2018. He notes that some of the main sponsors of the project were the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Screenshot with Jordan Setser’s tweet We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what will happen next. Episodes End of story. Podcast Advertising. “Was the emergence of this disease planned in advance?” – asks the blogger. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause various diseases in animals and humans. The new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 became known in late 2019, leading to speculation that the institute knew about it in advance and decided to patent a vaccine against it. The Pirbright Institute has patented its discovery, but it is related to the creation of a vaccine against a previously known coronavirus that infected chickens. Because of its association with the founder of Microsoft, the institute has found itself at the center of other, even larger, but unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, according to which certain dark forces led by Bill Gates have orchestrated the pandemic in order to reap astronomical profits from the sale of vaccines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the largest sponsors of global health projects, and the Pirbright Institute does not hide the fact that it receives funding from them for research purposes to develop vaccines. However, the funding is in no way linked to obtaining a patent. At the end of March, after being attacked on social media, the Pirbright Institute, together with the University of Oxford and Public Health England, began testing an anti-coronavirus vaccine in pigs. This is a necessary requirement before human clinical trials can begin. The BBC attempted to contact Setter for comment, but did not receive a response from him. In one of his tweets, he then wrote that he did not claim that the patent obtained by the Pirbright Institute was for the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
Bill Gates has become a frequent subject of conspiracy theories. If you search for the phrase “Pirbright Institute” on social media using CrowdTangle from January 16 to June 16, you will get 191,000 results. In the previous six months, there were only 711 mentions. The institute has been accused of various transgressions: that it allegedly has a patent on the virus or a vaccine against it, that it is actually based in Wuhan, and that its owner is Bill Gates.
Dr. Erica Bickerton works at the Pirbright Institute. Staff at the institute began to insult and mock. Molecular virology specialist Dr. Erica Bickerton received an e-mail: “You know how the virus works, so you must know how to destroy it… So please, I’m begging you, don’t let my family die, tell me what the antidote is”. “Personally, it was painful for me to see all this misinformation because we treat pets and try to understand this virus,” Bickerton said. Someone even created a fake Pirbright Institute website offering to sell the coronavirus as a biological weapon.
“When conspiracy theories start, people don’t understand that there are real people behind social media accounts,” said Teresa Mohan. The four-person PR team was unprepared for the amount of negativity that appeared on social media. The Press Office reported the most outrageous messages and threatening phone calls to the police. Complaints about unacceptable content were also sent to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The Institute informed the British Parliamentary Commission investigating cases of COVID-19 disinformation that Internet platforms did not help them even after complaints. Facebook told the BBC that posts containing false information about the Pirbright Institute’s invention of coronavirus and a patent for an anti-coronavirus vaccine were not removed because they did not violate the social network’s established rules. Fact-checking organizations have found these publications to be unreliable.
But the problems didn’t stop there. In May, a video went viral and was viewed by a million people in one day. It made unsubstantiated claims about the institute’s role in the pandemic and the patent on the vaccine. Several variations of this video have been removed, two of which were found by the BBC on YouTube. The video hosting company said: “We have clear rules regarding the spread of disinformation on YouTube, and we have made additions to the rules to ensure that content on our platform does not contradict WHO guidelines.” Quotes from the video have been widely circulated on Twitter. A company representative told the BBC that they do not take action on every tweet that contains controversial information related to Covid-19, but instead focus on publications that encourage actions that could cause harm. The staff of the Pirbright Institute has had a tough time, but they hope the worst is behind them. The insults have stopped. Angry people no longer call. According to Erica Bikerton, after what happened, she realized that it was necessary to talk more about the research being done and to give people truthful information. “Being part of this research and trying to learn more about the new coronavirus is great. It is very important for the development of effective vaccines,” says the doctor.