The public discussion around the cyclospora outbreak, the largest in U.S. history, initially focused on food safety: How could the parasite be killed? What foods were affected?
Then, suddenly, social media chatter lurched into conjecture about politics.
Much of the online discussion turned — in the span of a single day — to whether the Trump administration was meddling in the investigation that linked the outbreak to the food producer Taylor Farms, which donated $1 million in March to a super PAC for President Trump and has a history of supporting the Republican Party.
And days after the government first linked Taylor Farms to the illnesses, the politicized narrative continued to make up a significant portion of the talk of the outbreak. More than 62 percent of the online conversation about Taylor Farms over the past week referred to the claims, according to research from PeakMetrics, an analytics company.
The administration firmly denied any connection. The Department of Health and Human Services said on X that “nothing influences our decisions except science and the safety of the American people.” But the government’s conflicting announcements have helped fuel the speculation.
Narratives, particularly sensational ones, often take root online and spread quickly. The cyclospora situation, however, has been especially fertile ground: a public health emergency playing out in a country with waning faith in the public health apparatus, involving close ties between an implicated produce company and a president long accused of self-dealing.
To disinformation experts, the speed with which speculation about political machinations overtook fact-finding conversations demonstrated how fully primed the online ecosystem has become to accept rumor and falsehoods.
“There is massive distrust right now in these institutions, and now you’re layering on top of that the conspiracy theories that emerge so incredibly quickly on social media,” said Timothy Caulfield, a professor studying health misinformation at the University of Alberta.
Health officials across multiple states have recorded more than 11,000 confirmed or suspected cyclospora infections this summer, but the true scale of the outbreak is difficult to discern. The parasite, transmitted through tainted food and water, causes symptoms that can take days or weeks to emerge, making its origins difficult to trace.
Federal health officials publicly linked Taylor Farms to the outbreak on July 16. Two days later, the Food and Drug Administration said a test of shredded iceberg lettuce that had been processed by Taylor Farms de Mexico found cyclospora. A day after that, however, the agency said that the finding was actually a false positive. Taylor Farms, which had issued a voluntary recall of lettuce from 27 states, said that the F.D.A. had apologized. The agency said it hadn’t, at least not officially, and added that there was still strong evidence tying the producer to the outbreak.
As the public back-and-forth unfolded, social media users also discovered the $1 million donation from Taylor Farms’ corporate parent to MAGA Inc., one of the main super PACs supporting the president. The company recently hired Mr. Trump’s former deputy director of White House personnel.
Taylor Farms executives met with officials from the White House and the F.D.A. the same day the company was first linked to the outbreak. There, they sought to distance the company from it.
Taylor Farms’ links to conservatives led people online to claim, without evidence, that the Trump administration had a hand in the F.D.A.’s walking back its test result — purportedly as a quid pro quo for the company’s financial backing. Some of the posts were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. (PeakMetrics said in a blog post that a third of the initial references to the politicized rumors seemed to originate from bot accounts.)
Kush Desai, a spokesman for the White House, said in an email that “any notion that the White House or Trump administration would ever compromise on the health and safety of the American people is absolutely false.”
Taylor Farms did not directly address the online rumors but said in a statement that it would “continue to be transparent as more information becomes available” and that as of July 19, no tested samples of its produce had been confirmed positive for cyclospora.
Scientists have said that false positives are common when testing for the pathogen, a difficult process that they said had likely been undermined by cuts to federal surveillance programs as well as funding limitations and staffing shortages at state and local public health departments.
