Desperate to deflect growing international interest in discovering the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, China is regurgitating one of its more absurd conspiracy theories.

This being the theory that the coronavirus did not originate in China but actually escaped from the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick biolab. On Wednesday, Beijing’s state media’s Global Times editorialized on the need for the World Health Organization to investigate Fort Detrick. Accessing the Maryland military base is necessary, the foreign policy mouthpiece says, because since “2019, the Fort Detrick biolab has shown many signs worthy of attention, and should be included in the first group of targets for investigation.”