Why the Chinese believe Covid was leaked from an American lab

“In July 2019, a mysterious pneumonia outbreak associated with e-cigarette use was reported in W. Symptoms included shortness of breath, fever, cough, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, dizziness and chest pain. Starting from then, an unprecedented outbreak of lung disease spread across the nation…”

This is the latest salvo in the global information war raging over the origins of Sars-CoV-2. But the “W” in question is not Wuhan, it’s Wisconsin. And the exquisitely detailed briefing document from which it comes – a document that reveals “darkest experiments” – did not come via Washington Post deep-throats, but from China’s ambassador to the United Nations.

What’s more, the audience for this latest version of the Covid lab leak theory is not the billion of us who live in the West, but the 6.9 billion who live elsewhere in the world – many of whom are lapping it up.

The briefing was sent to the World Health Organisation this week by Ambassador Chen Xu, China’s permanent representative to the UN. Entitled “Doubtful Points about Fort Detrick (US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease)”, the 1,100-word letter calls for a “transparent investigation with full access” into the high security laboratories of Fort Detrick, in Maryland, and University of North Carolina in the United States.

It does not state categorically that Covid came from an American lab – that would be too far-fetched – but it says it is a possibility that should not be ignored. After all, an American scientist called Prof Ralph Baric is known to have developed a system for manipulating the genetic structure of Sars coronaviruses before the outbreak, it says.

“Fort Detrick, where the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) is located, is the centre of US bio-military activities and notorious for its illegal, non-transparent and unsafe practices,” the ambassador wrote. “Serious concerns have long been raised by the international community over US activities at Fort Detrick, in particular about USAMRIID, and there are many doubtful points about its connections with Covid-19.”

At far as internet trolling goes, this is about as good as it gets. For more than a year now, Chinese-linked social media accounts and news outlets have been propagating conspiracy theories suggesting the virus started in the US. The posts started after President Trump’s jibes about “Kung Flu” and suggestion the virus came from a Wuhan lab. Initially, they were disparate and seemed relatively harmless.

“Facts about the Wuhan Institute of Virology are open and transparent,” Zhao Lijian, an outspoken Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, wrote on Twitter last August. “But much remains unclear about the US’s #FortDetrick and over 200 bio labs in the world.”

Then in May, President Biden ordered a 90-day probe into whether the virus came from a Chinese lab accident – and, from that point on, the conspiracy theories on both sides stepped up a gear.

While the “Wuhan lab leak” theory was gaining credence in the West, the idea that Covid came from the Fort Detrick “Disease Factory” spread across China and its neighbours. The ambassador’s letter, published yesterday, takes the Chinese version out of the shadows and into the mainstream on exactly the same day as Mr Biden’s apparently “inconclusive” US report was due for publication.

“It all feels a bit Alice in Wonderland,” Stuart Neil, a professor of virology at King’s College London, who has been tracking theories about the origins of Covid, said. “The evidence for lab leaks is circumstantial and fairly flimsy. It’s like adding two and two together and getting five. This letter from China is just a mickey-take, by the sounds of it. The whole thing has been poisoned by politics.”

The extent to which lab leak theories have gained traction among their respective publics is shocking, given the paucity of solid evidence for either version. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other disease outbreaks have been shown to have emerged from animals, but we humans, it seems, prefer Hollywood-styled explanations.

A recent US poll found that 46 per cent of American adults think Covid originated with a lab leak, while 26 per cent believe the virus began naturally. The poll of 2,200 adults, conducted in June, found 70 per cent of Republicans believe in the Wuhan lab leak theory.

It’s the same in China – except, as one expert says, it is reasonable to assume its population believes the virus came from an American lab.

Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “Right after the [Wuhan] lab leak became a credible hypothesis in the US, official media [in China] basically doubled down on allegations that a US military lab could be the origin point of the pandemic. It seems to be safe to assume that more than 90 per cent of the [Chinese] population believe this pandemic began in the US in a military lab.”

That view was supported by a voxpop done by the BBC on the streets of Shanghai yesterday. A reporter asked passersby where they thought the virus had come from – and they each pointed to America. “I think it definitely comes from the US, because it was them who brought it here, I just know it,” said one.

Chinese officials, like Mr Trump and Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, before them, have taken to pushing the theory at official briefings. And the Global Times, a state newspaper which tirelessly apes the Community Party’s line, has started a populist campaign on the issue.

Last month, the outlet, which has a print circulation of 2.6 million, launched an online petition calling for Fort Detrick to be investigated. Some 25 million signatures were allegedly collected in only three weeks. Yesterday, the paper ran a garish graphic on Twitter, offering a timeline of Fort Detrick’s “terrible safety record” and alleged “incidents of ‘lab-created coronaviruses’” dating from 2011.

Meanwhile, the nationalist hip-hop group CD Rev has released a rap touting the theory. The lyrics contain the lines: “How many plots came out of your labs? How many dead bodies hanging a tag? What are you hiding? Open the door to Fort Detrick.”

Disinformation over the causes of pandemics is not new. The Spanish flu of 1918 got its name only because Spain was one of the few places where newspapers were not censored during the First World War. The H1N1 virus that caused the pandemic is actually thought to have originated in Haskell County, Kansas.

China may also have learnt a lesson or two from its sometime ally Russia, the country most often associated with sophisticated disinformation campaigns.

Its modern model for propaganda has been called “the firehose of falsehood” and has two distinctive features: a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths and outright fictions, and the ability to do it through multiple channels and at a high volume. “Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience,” noted one observer.

Soviet Russia’s highly effective “Operation Infektion” in the Eighties was an early example. The KGB instigated and propagated the idea that HIV/Aids was developed as part of a secret military research programme at – you guessed it – Fort Detrick.

“In 1977, a special top security lab… was set up… at the Pentagon’s central biological laboratory,” wrote a Russian stooge in a paper the Soviets then circulated to media outlets in more than 80 countries. “One year after that… the first cases of Aids occurred in the US, in New York City.”

Today, as China and the US joust over competing lab theories, others worry that the window of opportunity to discover the true origins of Sars-CoV-2 is narrowing.

In an opinion piece published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, members of the WHO team that went to Wuhan earlier this year to investigate the pandemic’s origins warned time was running out and many necessary studies would soon become “biologically impossible”.