How an imaginary disease is setting off a real-world panic.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and so it is with Disease X, the ominous sounding illness that doesn’t actually exist. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization published its annual list of “priority diseases,” or illnesses that “pose the greatest public health risk due to their epidemic potential and/or whether there is no or insufficient countermeasure.” On the bottom of the list, below Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever and Rift Valley fever, is Disease X, which is, as Lifehacker Senior Health Editor Beth Skawrecki explained in January, a generic term to represent a disease outbreak that hasn't occurred yet.
Normal people (the few who noticed, anyway) responded by thinking, “That’s cool, we really should prepare for the emergence of new and heretofore unknown pathogens, because look how COVID caught us flat-footed.” Conspiracy theorists and grifters, however, took the term “Disease X” and ran with it, creating an imaginary illness that fits into (and furthers) their larger paranoia-driven worldview.
According to Alex Jones, Disease X is “a secret weapon of the New World Order,” a “genocidal kill weapon” soon to be deployed by “the globalists.” Twitter users have posted (highly dubious) videos of helicopters supposedly dropping Disease X-ridden mosquitos on the population, shared photos of mobile cremation vans from China intended for Disease X victims (fake, of course), and speculated about whether Disease X is being spread through cocaine. This is just of sampling of the many batshit theories floating around the internet.
Despite the ravings of Alex Jones and company, Disease X isn't a deadly new infection. It's not even real. As the World Health Organization takes pains to explain in the report where it’s mentioned, "Disease X" is the term the organization uses to talk about any as-yet-unknown pathogen that could threaten public health. Like the X in an algebra problem, the name represents a "knowable unknown" in the discussion of how to best use public health resources. The term has been used by the WHO since 2018, and it was first proposed in 2015 as a way to reduce the time between the identification of viral outbreaks and the approval of vaccines or treatments.
In the pre-pandemic days of 2018, Jonathan Quick, chair of the U.S.-based Global Health Council, told The Telegraph, that talking about “Disease X” could be a way of breaking through the public’s complacency regarding disease outbreaks. “There is a cycle of panic and complacency. We’re currently sliding back into complacency,” Quick said.
But Quick’s interpretation didn’t have the benefit of the data about public opinion that we gathered during the pandemic, when we discovered there’s a third element to how the public reacts to public health crises beyond complacency and panic: Lunacy. Quick couldn’t have known that a fairly sizable portion of the population (at least on social media) would react to an actual public health threat by ignoring common sense protective measures and becoming outwardly hostile to anyone who proposes them. Or that the same people would later react to a potential future public health emergency as if it was already happening, and part of a sinister, secret plan to depopulate the earth. Which, to be fair, how can you plan for that?
In keeping with the pattern of conspiracy theories in post-truth America, Disease X hysteria is more than another weird obsession for housebound cranks. It was quickly seized on as a way to steal money from the ignorant. "Misinformation mongers are trying to exploit this conspiracy theory to sell products," Timothy Caulfield, from the University of Alberta in Canada, told AFP.
For instance, supplement hawking concern The Wellness Company says “whether Disease X turns out to be a new COVID variant, Marburg virus, Monkeypox, genetically engineering mosquitos, or whatever they invent next” you can prevent it through the company’s “Spike Support Formula” pills. For only $64.99, you can have a bottle of pills that contains both nattokinase and dandelion root, and will apparently prevent even hypothetical diseases. (You could also take Ivermectin for some reason.)
Alex Jones will be proven right about Disease X. Not the Globalist part, but the part where a deadly new virus or bacterial infection appears at some point in the future and spreads among the human population, necessitating another round of public health actions from the world’s governments.
This is how diseases have always worked, but in the minds of the conspiracy theorists, there will be no question that the new disease was a made in a lab and is being employed as a “kill shot” by The Globalists, as was foretold. They’ll be able to point back to the WHO report and say, “See? They told us they were making Disease X back in 2024, and now here it is, and no, I'm not taking their phony vaccine. I'm cool with my dandelion root." (Just imagine this rant interrupted by several minutes of loud, strained coughing.)
Healthcare denialism has real world consequences beyond how annoying it is when conspiracy theorists think they’re right though. Anti-vaccine propaganda has actual victims. An unknowable number of people might be alive today if they'd been (or been able to be) vaccinated for COVID, and we're also seeing new outbreaks of measles in places where anti-vaccine conspiracy theories have taken root. Like Florida: The state has a 92% vaccination rate for the disease, but according to the CDC, the immunization threshold to prevent outbreaks is 95%, so measles is breaking out in the state. This is in keeping with an easily recognizable pattern: When vaccination rates go down, measles rates go up.
Even more troubling is the official response: Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo didn’t advice parents to vaccinate their children or keep them quarantined if infected. Instead, he wrote: “The DOH is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance,” a move many feel could accelerate the outbreak and endanger children, and which seems to be signaling tacit approval to the delusions of vaccine denialists.
