Another danger spreads from China — fake news on COVID

When a conspiracy theory first started circulating in China suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from a U.S. military lab, it largely stayed on the fringe. Now, the ruling Communist Party has propelled the idea into the mainstream.

This week, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman repeatedly used an official podium to elevate unproven ideas that the coronavirus may have first leaked from a research facility in Fort Detrick, Md. A Communist Party publication, the Global Times, started an online petition in July calling for that lab to be investigated and said it gathered 25 million signatures.

Officials and state media have promoted a rap song by a patriotic Chinese hip-hop group that touted the same claim, with the lyrics: "How many plots came out of your labs? How many dead bodies hanging a tag?"

Beijing is peddling groundless theories that the United States may be the true source of the coronavirus, as it pushes back against efforts to investigate the pandemic's origins in China.

These theories, promoted by officials, academics, central propaganda outlets and on social media, risk further muddying inquiries into the source of the virus and aggravating already frayed relations between the world's top two powers at a time when cooperation is badly needed.

"This not only contributes to the further deterioration of U.S.-China relations but also makes it even less likely for the two countries to work together to face a common challenge," said Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University. "We haven't seen any bilateral cooperation over the vaccines, tracing the trajectory of the virus or mutations, any of these kind of things."

Understanding the origin of the virus could help scientists prevent another pandemic. Virologists still largely lean toward the theory that the virus jumped from infected animals to humans outside a lab, but calls are growing to also investigate the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak.

Wary of independent scrutiny, Beijing has tightly controlled efforts by the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the outbreak, and it rejected the health agency's recent call for a second phase of an inquiry that would look more closely at the lab theory.

China has been ramping up its disinformation campaign ahead of the results of an investigation by U.S. intelligence agencies, ordered by President Joe Biden. The agencies delivered their report on the origin of the pandemic to the president on Tuesday but have not yet concluded whether the virus emerged naturally or was the result of an accidental leak from a lab.

The Chinese government has argued that Beijing has done its part in the search for the origin of the pandemic by facilitating a visit by experts from the WHO earlier this year, and that scientists should now look at other countries, including the United States. Beijing accuses those pushing for a lab investigation in China of trying to undermine the country's image at home and abroad.

Michael Ryan, a WHO official, criticized China at a news conference Wednesday for pushing such unproven ideas. "It is slightly contradictory if colleagues in China are saying that the lab leak hypothesis is unfounded in the context of China, but we now need to go and do laboratory investigations in other countries for leaks there," Ryan said.

Yet in a report released this month, several Chinese policy research institutes accused the United States of "manipulating global public opinion by practicing 'origin tracing terrorism.'" China was being transparent, the report said, while American officials were evading questions about Fort Detrick.

He defended the report's allegations about the Fort Detrick lab, saying, essentially, that it was the United States that started it.

"It was American politicians who first said it and expanded on this," Wang said. "China could have been cooperative originally, but after facing such smears, it must also raise reasonable questions to the United States."

The report argued that the pandemic may have started in the United States, pointing to the closure of a lab at Fort Detrick over safety concerns in August 2019 and deaths at a nursing home in Virginia in July 2019 as suspicious.

Never mind that such claims have been widely dismissed by scientists. ("I don't think there is any validity to those accusations," said Huang of Seton Hall University.) They have been given prominent play in China.

"Why has the United States not invited the WHO to visit Fort Detrick?" the People's Daily wrote in an Aug. 6 commentary. "On the issue of traceability, if you can come to China, why can't you go to the United States?"

Jenny Zhang, a 21-year-old student in the eastern city of Nanjing, said she signed the Global Times petition for a Fort Detrick investigation after reading multiple reports in Chinese media that suggested the outbreak began much earlier in the United States.