Did The Simpsons predict the coronavirus outbreak? Fact Check

Claims are spreading that TV show The Simpsons correctly predicted the coronavirus outbreak back in a 1993 episode.

FALSE

Claims about The Simpson’s seemingly incredible prowess to predict future events often circulate widely across the Internet. There is a smidgen of truth to the claims, in that The Simpsons did once mention a “President Trump” in a 2000 episode, and they did “predict” a Lady Gaga Superbowl performance five years before she really did grace the field at halftime.

However, both of the above claims were embellished to make them appear more remarkable than they actually were. Other prophecy related claims are flat out false, such as the assertion that The Simpsons predicted the Notre Dame fire or that Trump would try and purchase Greenland.

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This next one falls more into the flat out false category. No, The Simpsons did not predict the coronavirus outbreak. We could locate no The Simpsons episode that specifically references the coronavirus.

Most claims circulate with the below images.

However, while the images may appear to tell a remarkable prophecy, they don’t. Firstly, the above left image featuring the news anchor has been digitally altered, and was not from the same episode as the other three pictures. The word “coronavirus” has been added to this image, which originally read “apocalypse meow“.

As for the other images, this is from a season 4 episode “Marge in Chains“. In this episode, many of the shows resident characters are infected by the Osaka Flu, which originated from Japan. That’s a far cry from the coronavirus, which of course originated from China. Those pertinent differences barely registers this as a mundane coincidence.

Since we could not find any episode that does actually reference a coronavirus outbreak, we rank this claim false.