The climate science denial machine created by the fossil fuel industry is now a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. Deniers have deployed many of the same tactics they have used to attack climate scientists and delay action to downplay the severity of the coronavirus outbreak and sow distrust in the response efforts of governments, scientists and the medical community — with deadly consequences that are now unfolding before our eyes. 

Others have used the threat of COVID-19 to argue against action to address climate change, which would leave us all more vulnerable to the wide array of future catastrophes that scientists say will result from additional degrees of warming.

In the following series, DeSmog presents the #COVIDenial evidence our team has gathered revealing the overlapping cast of characters who have long attacked climate science and are now spreading COVID misinformation, touting false cures, ginning up conspiracy theories and fomenting attacks on public health experts. We began tracking this overlap in March 2020, when Sharon Kelly wrote Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks.

Many of these groups, including Koch network-funded entities such as Americans for Prosperity and State Policy Network members have also attacked stay-at-home orders and orchestrated ‘Liberate’ movement protests nationwide, as Steve Horn wrote in COVID-19 ‘Liberate’ Groups Are the Same Ones Pushing Climate Denial. And as DeSmog UK’s Zak Derler reported in Climate Science Deniers Use Coronavirus to Downplay Environmental Threats, notorious climate deniers around the world are even claiming that the novel coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, or that it’s an evil plot by “globalist elites” like Bill Gates and George Soros to alternately force vaccines or a “world population cull.” 

These are dangerous operatives at work spreading all manner of doubt and delusion to confuse the public, and their actions and words will forever cement them on the wrong side of history.

Explore the report materials below, and please contact DeSmog with any other examples of COVID denial you come across.