NEW YORK: The coronavirus has given rise to a flood of conspiracy theories, disinformation and propaganda, eroding public trust and undermining health officials in ways that could elongate and even outlast the pandemic.

Claims that the virus is a foreign bioweapon, a partisan invention or part of a plot to re-engineer the population have replaced a mindless virus with more familiar, comprehensible villains. Each claim seems to give a senseless tragedy some degree of meaning, however dark.

Rumours of secret cures — diluted bleach, turning off your electronics, bananas — promise hope of protection from a threat that not even world leaders can escape.

The belief that one is privy to forbidden knowledge offers feelings of certainty and control amid a crisis that has turned the world upside down. And sharing that "knowledge" may give people something that is hard to come by after weeks of lockdowns and death: a sense of agency.

"It has all the ingredients for leading people to conspiracy theories," said Karen Douglas, a social psychologist who studies belief in conspiracies at the University of Kent in Britain.

Rumors and patently unbelievable claims are spread by everyday people whose critical faculties have simply been overwhelmed, psychologists say, by feelings of confusion and helplessness.

But many false claims are also being promoted by governments looking to hide their failures, partisan actors seeking political benefit, run-of-the-mill scammers and, in the United States, a president who has pushed unproven cures and blame-deflecting falsehoods.

The conspiracy theories all carry a common message: The only protection comes from possessing the secret truths that "they" don’t want you to hear.

The feelings of security and control offered by such rumors may be illusory, but the damage to the public trust is all too real.

It has led people to consume fatal home remedies and flout social distancing guidance. And it is disrupting the sweeping collective actions, like staying at home or wearing masks, needed to contain a virus that has already killed more than 79,000 people.

"We’ve faced pandemics before," said Graham Brookie, who directs the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. "We haven’t faced a pandemic at a time when humans are as connected and have as much access to information as they do now."

This growing ecosystem of misinformation and public distrust has led the World Health Organization to warn of an "infodemic."

"You see the space being flooded," Brookie said, adding, "The anxiety is viral, and we’re all just feeling that at scale."

The Allure of ‘Secret Knowledge’

"People are drawn to conspiracies because they promise to satisfy certain psychological motives that are important to people," Douglas said. Chief among them: command of the facts, autonomy over one’s well-being and a sense of control.

If the truth does not fill those needs, we humans have an incredible capacity to invent stories that will, even when some part of us knows they are false. A recent study found that people are significantly likelier to share false coronavirus information than they are to believe it.

"The magnitude of misinformation spreading in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic is overwhelming our small team," Snopes, a fact-checking site, said on Twitter. "We’re seeing scores of people, in a rush to find any comfort, make things worse as they share (sometimes dangerous) misinformation."

Widely shared, Instagram posts falsely suggested that the coronavirus was planned by Bill Gates on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. In Alabama, Facebook posts falsely claimed that shadowy powers had ordered sick patients to be secretly helicoptered into the state. In Latin America, equally baseless rumours have proliferated that the virus was engineered to spread HIV. In Iran, pro-government voices portray the disease as a Western plot.

If the claims are seen as taboo, all the better.

The belief that we have access to secret information may help us feel that we have an advantage, that we are somehow safer. "If you believe in conspiracy theories, then you have power through knowledge that other people don’t have," Douglas said.

Italian media buzzed over a video posted by an Italian man from Tokyo, where he claimed that the coronavirus was treatable but that Italian officials were "hiding the truth."

Other videos, popular on YouTube, claim that the entire pandemic is a fiction staged to control the population.

Still others say that the disease is real, but its cause isn’t a virus — it’s 5G cellular networks.

One YouTube video pushing this falsehood, and implying that social distancing measures could be ignored, has received 1.9 million views. In Britain, there has been a rash of attacks on cellular towers.

Conspiracy theories may also make people feel less alone. Few things tighten the bonds of "us" like rallying against "them," especially foreigners and minorities, both frequent scapegoats of coronavirus rumours and much else before now.

But whatever comfort that affords is short-lived.

Over time, research finds, trading in conspiracies not only fails to satisfy our psychological needs, Douglas said, but also tends to worsen feelings of fear or helplessness.

And that can lead us to seek out still more extreme explanations, like addicts looking for bigger and bigger hits.