A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in the United States has called for the World Health Organization (WHO) to investigate an American military lab in Maryland, once again echoing the debunked conspiracy theory that the Chinese Wuhan coronavirus originated not in China, but in the United States, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Spokesman Liu Pengyu confirmed to the Beacon that the Chinese government stood by several of its latest propaganda reports claiming that America, not China, was responsible for the outbreak of the pandemic. He pointed to Fort Detrick in Maryland, over 7,500 miles away from Wuhan, as the true source of the virus.
“About Fort Detrick, the US has remained silent on the serious concerns raised about the international community, including US media,” Liu claimed, without any evidence. “The US side must understand that the international community has every reason to raise questions about Fort Detrick, which has a poor track record, and is notorious for breaches in lab and contaminant leak, and demand clarification from the US side and call on the WHO to conduct a thorough investigation into it.”
The Chinese government has rushed to promote this counter-narrative, as evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the coronavirus was, in fact, the result of being manufactured in a lab rather than natural occurrences. Evidence points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as the source of the virus, with the first officially-documented cases occurring in the nearby town of Wuhan, where the “wet market” was initially blamed for the outbreak due to the high amount of raw food there.
Among the evidence that has been uncovered includes the fact that several employees at the WIV fell ill with coronavirus symptoms as early as November 2019, well before the first cases emerged outside the lab. Such proof has also led to increased scrutiny of the United States government’s involvement with the lab, including the confirmation that Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had provided grant funding to the lab for years prior to the outbreak.