Omicron Variant Conspiracies Are Already a Thing on the Right

Screen capture from Fox & Friends

It took less than a day from the announcement of a new and potentially dangerous Covid-19 variant—officially named “Omicron” by world health authorities—before right-wing commentators and politicians began to spread conspiracies about it.

Fox News hosts suggested over the weekend that the emergence of the Omicron variant was intentional in order to spare Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg from doing his job. Buttigieg, whom one host noted could be elected president in 2024 if the Democratic Party got its way, had indicated that supply chain problems would persist so long as the pandemic persisted. “And now we see this new variant,” host Rachel Campos-Duffy remarked, “So that’s the answer: more lockdowns… more fear, and therefore he doesn’t have to do his job of fixing the supply chain, because ‘we’ll just keep this whole thing going.” Her co-hosts chimed in with agreement. “There’s always a new variant,” said Will Cain. “Count on a variant about every October,” added co-host Pete Hegseth.

Never mind the fact that this variant was discovered in Southern Africa by scientists there well after the November elections, and never mind the variant poses a real threat to the very economic recovery that is crucial to the Democrats’ political fortunes next year. Epidemiologists have warned about the likely emergence of a dangerous, even possibly vaccine-evading variant since the start of the pandemic, with largely unvaccinated regions of the world posing the greatest risk for dangerous mutations to emerge. We saw that already with the Delta variant; Omicron or something like it has been nearly inevitable from the start. Nevertheless, the far-right presses its bizarre case.

A Republican national elected official added his own unique flavor to the conspiracy theory over Omicron. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) suggested the variant was used to push election fraud, an astonishing meshing of two conspiracies into one. “Here comes the MEV - the Midterm Election Variant!” tweeted Jackson. “They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election - but we're not going to let them!” Jackson is best known for having raved about Trump’s excellent health and suspicious weight of just 239 pounds when he served as Trump’s personal physician in 2018.

Statements like Jackson’s and those of the Fox hosts are dangerous because they contribute to continuing skepticism over the dangers and reality of the virus. But they also contribute to a maddening American exceptionalism that hinders meaningful policy discourse. That a variant posing a global threat and causing nations, from Israel to Japan, to shut their borders to outsiders again could somehow be a false threat cooked up by Democratic operatives in the U.S. defies common sense while giving devious American politicians far too much credit. These same American blinders are what cause U.S. consumers to look at our high inflation rate and blame the White House for gas and food prices, when in fact inflation is a worldwide phenomenon due to international supply chain issues. 

MAGA politicians and pundits know, however, that they can exploit this persistent parochialism to great effect and turn any global crisis into a domestic political one for the Democrats. The counter-narrative requires more nuance and explanation, which means Democrats will usually lose the messaging battle. After all, fact-checking the idea that the Omicron variant isn’t a Democratic hoax requires some baseline common sense and logic that sadly are no longer readily accessible for many on the right. Their propagandists understand that when something goes bad, finding someone to blame for it (the Chinese, Dr. Fauci, the Democrats) is far easier than taking the time to explain how we as a nation ought to respond to save lives and keep our economy stable and growing.