The United States issued a rare rebuke of China’s continued efforts to push baseless claims about COVID-19 originating with the U.S. military rather than starting in China.
Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said that the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, which has killed 2.85 million people worldwide, and both administrations cast doubt on the manner in which a joint WHO-China study released last week was conducted in early 2021. Chinese officials, diplomats, and state-run outlets have repeatedly attempted to shift blame to the U.S. military.
“The United States condemns the PRC’s false, baseless, and unscientific claims which undermine the spirit and purpose of an impartial origins investigation,” a State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “We remain concerned by the misleading alternative theories about the origins of the virus advanced by the PRC. We cannot know the origins of the virus and its spread until the PRC provides a full accounting of the actions it took and full transparency of the knowledge it had in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are going to base our conclusions on nothing other than the data and science.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has been pushing the baseless claims about the U.S. military, including Maryland’s Fort Detrick, for over a year, and he revived the claims last Monday as the WHO-China COVID-19 report was being made public.
“I cannot help but ask, when will the U.S. be as open and transparent as China on the epidemic and origin-tracing issues?” Zhao said. “When will the WHO experts be invited to the United States for a visit on origin-tracing? When will Fort Detrick be opened for international experts to visit, investigate, or study?”
WHO CHIEF SAYS WUHAN LAB NEEDS FURTHER INVESTIGATION
Hua Chunying, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, brought up the U.S. military claims too the next day, referencing the fact that Zhao had been pushing the claims for a year, saying, “As for the tweet posted by one of my colleagues on his personal account last year, I have noticed that some individuals from Western countries keep coming back to this issue. There really is no need for doing so.” She then pushed the baseless claims herself.
“Since the outbreak of COVID-19, how many lies and rumors and lies against China have been told by certain politicians, leaders, and lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe, including those about China’s lab leak and making of the virus? I wonder how many of those lies you have checked? Besides, there is still a big question mark over the lab at Fort Detrick,” Hua said.
She pushed the same conspiracy theory again the following day.
“There is always a question mark over lab leak. The expert team had an in-depth study in Wuhan, and we also know there are many reports of early outbreaks various in many places around the world. In addition to Fort Detrick, certain country has more than 200 biological bases around the world,” Hua said, adding, “As you all know, they’ve looked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and done some research. So when will the U.S. biological base at Fort Detrick, with a big question mark over it, allow international experts in for a visit?”
A White House spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that “if there were sound, technically credible reasons for such a step, we would of course support it – but there are none.” The spokesperson added: “If a future pandemic were to originate here or anywhere else, we would similarly insist on a swift and transparent science-based evaluation. In fact, that’s one of our concerns about this process – it must not be allowed to set a terrible precedent for the future.”
A Pentagon spokesperson pointed the Washington Examiner to its statement saying it was a “myth” that “U.S. service members visiting China were the source of the coronavirus outbreak.” The Defense Department said that the “fact” was that “the Department of Defense, along with senior U.S. administration officials, has repeatedly denounced the Chinese government’s efforts to deflect responsibility for downplaying the threat early on, as well as its lack of transparency during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, as being irresponsible and unhelpful with combating the pandemic the world is facing today.”
The WHO-China joint report said that the Chinese Epidemiology Group provided information on the 7th World Military Games, which were held in Wuhan in October 2019, and found that “no appreciable signals of clusters of fever or severe respiratory disease requiring hospitalization were identified during review of these events.”
Then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper critiqued China back in March 2020, saying China’s claims were “completely absurd,” “ridiculous,” and “irresponsible.”
An online petition on the now-defunct White House petition website pushed the U.S. military origins claims in March 2020, and though it didn’t get many signatures, it was widely referenced by the Chinese Communist Party. As one example, the Chinese state-run People’s Daily pushed the Fort Detrick conspiracy theory in May by referencing the White House petition.
In March 2020, Zhao shared an article from Global Research, known for spreading conspiracy theories, tweeting: “This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the U.S.”
Assistant Secretary of State David Stilwell summoned Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai after Zhao also twisted comments made by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield as evidence to support the conspiracy theory.
Zhao tweeted that “CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in U.S.? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! U.S. owe us an explanation!”
The State Department ramped up its condemnations during a call between then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the director of the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Communist Party, Yang Jiechi.
“Secretary Pompeo conveyed strong U.S. objections to PRC efforts to shift blame for COVID-19 to the United States,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in March 2020. “The secretary stressed that this is not the time to spread disinformation and outlandish rumors, but rather a time for all nations to come together to fight this common threat.”
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab report said that Zhao’s tweets were “referenced in at least 54 languages” and were “amplified by at least 30 different Chinese diplomatic and state-run accounts.” The report said Zhao’s claims “had an enormous impact on the domestic Chinese social media platform Weibo, with popular hashtags referencing Zhao’s tweets being viewed by Weibo users more than 300 million times,” and his tweets were reported on by Chinese state-run outlets such as CGTN, People’s Daily, and Global Times.
A nine-month investigation by the Associated Press “shows how a rumor that the U.S. created the virus that causes COVID-19 was weaponized by the Chinese government.” The Atlantic Council report also said that Russia and Iran also played key roles in pushing the baseless U.S. military claims.
WHO-Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last Tuesday that the Chinese government should have provided more complete data related to the early stages of the outbreak and said the WHO-China team had not fully investigated the potential of COVID-19 originating through an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab, a hypothesis he insisted still needed further study despite being dubbed “extremely unlikely” by the WHO-China team.
A Trump State Department fact sheet on the Wuhan Institute of Virology declassified in mid-January assessed that lab workers had fallen ill with COVID-19-like symptoms before the wider Wuhan outbreak in 2019 and that the Wuhan lab had conducted secret experiments with the Chinese military and gain-of-function research. The Biden administration has declined to weigh in publicly on the fact sheet, though the Washington Post reported that an unnamed Biden State Department official said it was factually accurate.
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The State Department and a number of U.S. allies released a joint statement on Tuesday critiquing the WHO-China report, saying that “we join in expressing shared concerns regarding the recent WHO-convened study in China.”
A State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner: “Our experts continue to evaluate the WHO report into the origins of COVID-19” and after hundreds of collective hours of scrutiny “what is clear from our review thus far is that the report lacks crucial data, information, and access” and “represents a partial and incomplete picture.”
The spokesperson said that “we have seen the PRC government playing an outsized role in finalizing this report and communicating the findings – early, before other WHO Member States received them and in ways that were inconsistent with objective and timely conclusions.”
Matt Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, argued in February that “if you weigh the circumstantial evidence, the ledger on the side of an explanation that says that this resulted from some kind of human error, it far outweighs the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak.” Redfield said in March that COVID-19 likely originated through an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab.
