Chief epidemiologist Zeng Guang of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told China’s state-run Global Times that the hunt for the true origins of the Wuhan coronavirus should now shift to the United States.
Zeng was perpetuating a Chinese conspiracy theory that the disease was actually cooked up in an American bioweapons lab – for which no evidence has yet surfaced.
The Chinese government has been seeking to shift attention away from its culpability for the pandemic since early 2020 by floating theories that the Chinese coronavirus was created in the U.S. Army laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and brought to China by visiting American troops.
As the world’s attention turns increasingly toward the Wuhan “lab leak” theory – driven by shifting political conditions in the United States, namely the departure of President Donald Trump, and by non-political scientists noticing that evidence for the virus jumping from animals to humans remains elusive – the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is desperate to change the subject.
The Global Times seized on evidence that the coronavirus might have been circulating in the U.S. and Europe earlier in 2019 than previously believed, which it erroneously presented as evidence that the virus came from the United States:
A US government study suggested that the coronavirus may have already been circulating among people one month earlier than it was officially confirmed, and French scientists also presented scientific evidence that the country’s cases were caused by an indigenous virus strain prevailing before 2020.
Chinese scientists urged that such evidence should not go unnoticed, and should serve as evidence that the next-stage virus-tracing investigations should be focused on countries which reported cases earlier than they previously identified, especially the US.
[…]
Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told Global Times on Wednesday that the US should be prioritized in the next-stage investigation, as the country was slow to test people at an early stage, and it possesses so many biological laboratories all around the world. “All bioweapons related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny,” Zeng said.
The Global Times also quoted French scientists who thought an “indigenous” coronavirus outbreak might have been in progress there long before the first officially recognized case of Chinese coronavirus in Wuhan, and some epidemiologists who speculated Sweden might have had its own outbreak around the same time.
Those quotes would seem to steal a little thunder from Zeng’s slanders about American bio-weapons laboratories, but the Communist Party’s goal is to muddy the issue, distract from the Wuhan labs, and perhaps badger the world into conceding that the Chinese coronavirus’s true origins will never be known.
“Western politicians playing with the ‘lab-leak’ theory or jab at China for being responsible are just tricks to get themselves away from their mishandling of the pandemic,” the Global Times sneered, quoting an anonymous “Beijing-based immunologist” who accused everyone but the Chinese Communists of “politicizing” the pandemic.
The U.S. study the Global Times referred to came from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unlike China, which frantically destroyed blood samples from the early days of the Wuhan outbreak and refused to share source data with the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), the U.S. has a large trove of samples that could be retroactively tested for the coronavirus, or more specifically for SARS-CoV-2, the formal name for the Chinese coronavirus.
Contrary to China’s propaganda, the NIH did not find evidence of SARS-CoV-2 from long before the Wuhan outbreak. Seven stored blood samples, out of 24,000 that were analyzed, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The samples came from Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a good distance from the early U.S. “hot spots” of Seattle and New York City.
The oldest sample was dated January 7, 2020. The earliest coronavirus cases acknowledged by the Chinese government were detected in December 2019, but there is considerable evidence for cases near Wuhan as early as mid-November 2019.
The NIH specifically noted that the authors of its study “do not know whether the participants with positive samples became infected during travel or while in their own communities.”
As former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb noted Wednesday, the early U.S. and European cases are more logically interpreted as evidence the coronavirus was “circulating in China much earlier than we suspect, and that it started to get exported on a small basis to other countries.”
“A previous study has raised the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could have been circulating in Europe as early as September, but experts said this didn’t necessarily mean it did not originate in China, where many SARS-like coronaviruses have been found in the wild,” Reuters reported Thursday.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.