CCP mouthpiece the Global Times is working overtime to dissuade the world from the fact that the coronavirus is a non-Chinese virus. If only it backed its claims with proven scientific research and not the run of the hill propaganda, it might have worked.
With increased calls from the international community for an open scientific international probe in China, the CCP via its international news outlet Global times is running the narrative that the Coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan. While it is undisputed that the virus did come from China, the CCP is pushing different narratives ranging from blaming the American Soldier from Fort Detrick in Maryland to blaming Italy, pointing fingers at the packaging of frozen food imports, and then shifting the blame on India and Bangladesh.
The first registered case of coronavirus was picked up in Wuhan, and since then countries like Thailand, Japan, South Korea, France, the United States, and Canada among others have reported their first registered cases had a travel history of visiting China.
Global Times has been working tirelessly; on November 29 it published an article stating that the virus originated in the Indian Subcontinent based on a study published by SSRN which was yet to be reviewed. The study titled ‘Early Cryptic Transmission and Evolution of SARS-COV-2 in Human Host’ was picked up by Chinese news outlets and was used to misrepresent the facts around the origin of the Chinese virus. The study published by SSRN was later even taken down.
Global times also quoted Zeng Guang, Chief Epidemiologist of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who claimed: “Wuhan is the place where the first infection cases were formally recorded, but it does not prove that the coronavirus originated from Wuhan.”
On November 28, Chinese owned media outlet CGTN went overboard and cited German virologist Alexander Kekule’s findings that suggested that the virus probably originated outside China’s territory. But Kekule also found that the virus strain in many COVID-19 patients around the world can be genetically traced to a variant that mutated and spread in northern Italy, but hasn’t suggested that the virus originated from there. Global Times misrepresented the facts and used Kekule’s findings to conclude that the virus originated in Italy and not in China.
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Moreover, China went on to claim that it found traces of coronavirus on food imports from Chile but these claims were later falsified by the CDC in the United States and other major Health governing bodies and authorities.
Moreover, in a bid to push an alternative discourse, China is blaming everyone but itself. Scientists around the world have agreed on the fact that the virus did in fact, originate in China. The only bone of contention which now remains is whether the virus jumped from bats to humans in the Wuhan wet market or was created in a biological lab in Wuhan.
Since the Pandemic, China’s bilateral relations have been put under immense pressure due to its inefficiency in controlling the virus and blindsiding the WHO and the entire world. It has been criticized and has suffered immense losses in trying to further its national interest. The immense losses have started to hurt the CCP as it sees its ‘China Dream’ of world domination wither away.