Coronavirus
As coronavirus cases dwindle in China and explode across the remainder of the planet, Beijing is undertaking a campaign to shift blame for the emergence of the disease to a well-known foe — the us.
The seemingly coordinated effort to, at minimum, sow doubts about the virus’s origin, and, at its most extreme, to directly accuse the U.S. military of making and spreading the pathogen, has come from Chinese medical leaders, ambassadors and Foreign Ministry spokespersons — to not mention the many thousands of comments on Chinese social media echoing the conspiracy theories.
The undertaking is a component of a broader campaign to deflect blame for the pandemic and China’s delay in taking action early within the emergence of the disease, which global experts say began in Wuhan, Hubei Province, potentially as early as November, and has infected quite 160,000 worldwide and killed nearly 6,000.
The first signs of Chinese skepticism of the virus’s origin came from the face of its fight against the epidemic, the celebrated doctor Zhong Nanshan, who was instrumental within the 2003 handling of the SARS crisis and has been featured in numerous televised interviews during the COVID-19 outbreak. At a news conference on Feb. 27, Zhong stated that the virus “may not have originated in China.”
Soon after, numerous Chinese politicians began what seemed to be a coordinated campaign to spread that concept, with several tweeting or uttering nearly identical statements questioning the origin of the virus.
On March 8, the Chinese ambassador to South Africa tweeted that, “Although the epidemic first broke call at China, it didn't necessarily mean that the virus is originated from China, including ‘made in China.’ ”
Days later, the clearest salvo within the conspiracy campaign came from China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, who tweeted: “CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? what percentage people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? it'd be United States Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”U.S. Department of Defense press secretary Alyssa Farah replied to Zhao’s tweet by saying, “As a worldwide crisis, COVID-19 [should] be a neighborhood of cooperation between nations. Instead, the Communist Party of China has chosen to promulgate false & absurd conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 blaming U.S. service members. #ChinaPropaganda.”
The State Department then summoned China’s ambassador in Washington in protest of the rumor. The assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, David Stilwell, expressed “stern representation” of the American position to Ambassador Cui Tiankai, who was “very defensive,” the State Department later said.
But conspiracy theories about the emergence of the virus aren’t limited to Chinese officials.
Last month, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton insinuated on Fox News that, because Wuhan is home to at least one of China’s leading high-level biosafety laboratories, “we need to get to rock bottom of” whether the virus emerged from that facility. (The Arkansas Republican later qualified his comments, saying the bioweapon theory is simply one of several possible explanations.)
Meanwhile, three prominent Iranian officials, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, unequivocally asserted that the virus was a manufactured bioweapon. Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to the UN secretary-general, which he posted on Twitter, adding, “It is obvious to the planet that the mutated coronavirus was produced in lab.”
Iran has been one among the hardest-hit countries outside of China by COVID-19.
China’s state media are equally involved in spreading skepticism of the virus’s origin. Official Communist Party publication Xinhua has published several articles questioning COVID-19’s provenance, and therefore the state-run Global Times wrote, “As the U.S. COVID-19 situation becomes increasingly obscure, the Chinese public shares the suspicion raised by Zhao Lijian that the U.S. could be the source of the virus which the U.S. is subject [to] questioning and is obliged to elucidate [its role to] the planet .”
None of the various public figures and media outlets positing the choice theories has provided evidence for his or her claims.
President Trump has been less critical of the rumors. On an equivalent day his State Department and Pentagon officials were responding forcefully against the Chinese comments, the president praised Beijing’s sharing of data with the U.S. and said the rumors didn't comport together with his conversations with President Xi Jinping. However, he later told a news conference at the White House, “They [the Chinese] know where it came from. We all know where it came from.”
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