China's conspiracy theory about the virus: 'The dark side of the US'

When World Health Organization investigators completed their work examining the origin of the coronavirus in Wuhan this month, Chinese officials were clear on where they thought the WHO should look next.

"(We hope) that following the example of China, the American side will act in a positive way, based on science and cooperation on the issue of origin tracing (and) invite WHO experts for an origin trace study. Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said last week.

Going even further, Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, said the US should now be the "focus" of global efforts to find the virus.

For months, China has advanced in alternative theories about how the coronavirus first appeared, avoiding any blame that officials in Wuhan may bear for not reacting quickly to the initial outbreak in late 2019.

One of the theories about China claims that the virus may have come out - either intentionally or by mistake - from a laboratory in Wuhan focused on research into deadly pathogens.

At the same time, Zeng was mentioning just such a hypothesis, but not in relation to Wuhan's lab, but Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army biomedical research lab in Maryland, USA. There is no evidence to support this theory.

"The United States has biological laboratories all over the world," he told a website in Shanghai. "Why do the United States have so many laboratories? What is the purpose of this?" tha Zeng. "In many ways, the US wants others to be open and transparent. In the end, it turns out that the US itself is often darker."

The idea that the coronavirus may have come from a laboratory is not isolated in China. Many politicians have pushed the idea that the Chinese lab may have been responsible, while others have put forward other ideas, including the US itself.

A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in April 2020 found that about 30% of Americans believed the virus was created in a laboratory and most claim it was created on purpose. Around that time, key members of Donald Trump's administration at the time linked the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the coronavirus, implying that he might have escaped - or even been released - from the lab.

This claim was angrily rejected by China and rebuked by leading scientists working on the virus. After an inspection of the laboratory itself this month, the WHO team partially rejected it as a hypothesis , but in another statement, did not rule it out .

Following the WHO investigation, state propaganda agencies in China have claimed justification and attacked both Washington and the Western media, which are questioning the findings.

Source: CNN, Reuters