Chicks hatch from their eggs. Credit: Otwarte Klatki/Andrew Skowron. CC BY 2.0.

As H5N1 avian influenza spreads in birds around the United States and elsewhere, causing farmers to cull tens of millions of chickens and other farmed birds, baseless conspiracy theories about the severity of the bird flu and its origins are spreading with it. On TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, users are questioning whether the virus is a bioweapon, suggesting it’s a ploy by Bill Gates, and claiming a TV interview with a former CDC director offers proof that the disease outbreaks were planned or that the flu news was designed to scare people. None of which is true.

So far, only two humans—one in Colorado and one in the UK—are known to have contracted the H5N1 flu virus that’s circulating now. Both had direct contact with infected birds.

The posts about bird flu are reminiscent of false conspiracy theories that circulated during an earlier time in the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media users are calling the outbreaks among birds a “plandemic,” a term popularized by those who pushed a range of false claims about the coronavirus pandemic. Across, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter, users have repurposed a video clip of former CDC Director Robert Redfield calling COVID-19 a wakeup call for a future avian influenza pandemic that could occur, if a form of bird flu were to mutate and become easily transmissible to and among humans. In March, on the Christian network Trinity Broadcasting...

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