The coronavirus pandemic was indisputably the story of 2020. It also led to the “Lie of the Year,” according to the fact-checking website PolitiFact. 

Rather than selecting a single false statement, PolitiFact announced Wednesday that it has chosen claims that denied, downplayed or disinformed about COVID-19 as its Lie of the Year. 

“Lies infected America in 2020. The very worst were not just damaging, but deadly,” PolitiFact’s Daniel Funke and Katie Sanders wrote in their article announcing the top lie. 

While the site noted that “the infodemic was not the work of a single person,” it added: “It was a symphony of counter narrative, and [President Donald] Trump was the conductor, if not the composer. The message: The threat to your health was overhyped to hurt the political fortunes of the president.”

As of Friday, there had been nearly 16.8 million coronavirus cases and more than 305,000 related deaths in the U.S.

PolitiFact accused Trump of fueling confusion and conspiracies, undermining public health guidance calling for masks to be worn and trying to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert.

The website called out Trump for admitting to journalist Bob Woodward that he downplayed the threat of the virus to avoid stirring a panic, spreading misinformation aimed at dismissing the country’s soaring COVID-19 death toll, repeating misleading information about the effectiveness of masks and touting the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment despite it being unproven.

But PolitiFact said many other people also contributed to the Lie of the Year, with some of them providing the misleading information that would later be repeated by Trump. The website pointed the finger at social media, far-right online media, and influential TV and radio hosts, including Fox News' Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Together, they all offered up junk science, spread false information about social distancing and masks, and told lies about COVID-19 vaccines, including that Bill Gates wanted to use them to microchip Americans and that they cause female infertility.

The site also mentioned the viral video "Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19," in which a former research scientist claims that elites had manipulated the virus in a lab and were plotting to use it and a vaccine to profit and gain power. 

PolitiFact began naming its Lie of the Year in 2009. Last year’s “winner” was Trump’s claim that a whistleblower got the president’s Ukraine call, in which he sought an investigation there into Joe Biden, “almost completely wrong.”

The website said it is becoming more difficult to identify a Lie of the Year because, “cynical pundits and politicians don’t pay much of a price for saying things that aren’t true.”

“For the past month, unproven claims of massive election fraud have tested democratic institutions and certainly qualify as historic and dangerously bald-faced,” Funke and Sanders wrote. “Fortunately, the constitutional foundations that undergird American democracy are holding.”