CLAIM: One year during the COVID-19 pandemic, people who control hurricanes “forgot” to give the United States a hurricane.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The United States experienced hurricanes in 2020 and 2021. The claim also falsely suggests that humans, not environmental factors, determine when hurricanes hit.
THE FACTS: In the wake of Hurricane Ian’s wrath on Cuba and southwest Florida, widely shared social media posts generated false claims that hurricanes were controlled by humans.
One such post spread a conspiracy theory that someone “forgot” to give the U.S. a hurricane during one of the years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The post, an Instagram Reel with more than 100,000 likes, featured a man standing on a beach, facing the camera.
“So was COVID so bad dat one year they jus forgot to give us a hurricane?” read overlaid text on the video.
The post is inaccurate — data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that nine named hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, during the global pandemic.
Among them were severe hurricanes such as Hurricane Laura in 2020 and Hurricane Ida in 2021, both Category 4 storms that ravaged Louisiana.
NOAA said in Atlantic hurricane season reports for 2020 and 2021 that each year had above-average tropical storm activity.
The post’s implication that humans, not environmental factors, engineer the timing and path of hurricanes, is also unfounded, growing from a conspiracy theory that some internet users took...
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