Chinese state media is really pushing Fort Detrick as the source site of the coronavirus – HotAir
This is not new behavior on the part of China. The CCP has been suggesting that the coronavirus originated in the United States since early last year. But in the last month or so, state media is doubling in the message:
“On the origins tracing work, China’s Foreign Ministry recently said the United States should start with four things, including publishing and reviewing data from its first cases, inviting WHO experts to investigate. Fort Detrick and its more than 200 Biolabs abroad, inviting WHO experts to investigate the University of North Carolina and disseminate data on sick American military athletes who attended the World Military Games in Wuhan, ”a report in the condition Global times saying…
In another article, Global times said there was a possibility “that some of the patients with the mysterious vaping-related lung disease that swept through all 50 US states in 2019 were actually COVID-19 patients ”. He cited a group of Chinese scientists and radiologists, who apparently reviewed “some 250 chest CT scans of published articles.”
One of the Global Times articles published this week included that cartoon of President Biden ordering intelligence agencies to find evidence of a lab leak in China while sitting with a shiny box labeled Fort Detrick under his desk. The same piece ends with a huge infographic who tries to recycle a lot of conspiracy nonsense, including the claim that Maatje Benassi is patient zero. The infographic attributes that story to “an American journalist.” What it doesn’t tell you is that the “journalist” was a YouTuber named George Webb who retracted the claim in a statement last April: “I am officially retracting my earlier report that Maatje Benassi tested positive for CoronaVirus. Now I realize that they were giving me bad information to catch me … “
Today, CNN reports that state media has also recently aired a 30-minute special that attempts to link the virus to Fort Detrick:
China’s state broadcaster CCTV, meanwhile, issued a 30 minute report this week titled “The Dark Inside History of Fort Detrick.” On Weibo, the heavily censored version of Twitter in China, a hashtag related to the report was the top trending topic on Tuesday morning. Since then, it has been viewed 420 million times.
On social media, some governments and state media The accounts promoted another unfounded theory of a dark italian tabloid, which alleged that the US military had spread the coronavirus to Italy through a blood donation program. Damn evidence! The coronavirus entered Europe from Fort Detrick through a US Army blood donation program, ”read the headline of a widely read story published by the Communist Youth League, the youth branch of the ruling Communist Party of China.
You can see the report on Fort Detrick for you. There is a large part of it that is based on news reports in English. For example, China suggests that a respiratory flare what happened in a retirement community in Virginia in July 2019 may have been caused by the coronavirus.
China’s propaganda is obviously aimed at one thing: taking the pressure off China, especially in light of the fact that researchers there have so far failed to uncover a convincing point of origin for the virus. None of this proves that the virus originated from a laboratory leak, but China’s defensive attitude is truly pathological and highly suspicious.
President Biden’s 90-day intelligence review on the matter should be complete by the end of this month. Recent reports have suggested that those agencies have become more, rather than less, convinced that a lab leak is a viable possibility. Hopefully we know more in a couple of weeks. And when we do, you can probably expect a big outburst of new nonsense from the Chinese state media.
