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#14452221 at 2021-08-25 07:51:59 (UTC+1)
Q Research AUSTRALIA #18 - Talisman Sabre: MAGIC SWORD Edition

US-led campaign targets Wuhan Institute of Virology with 'vague, misleading, mysterious' rumors

GT staff reporters - Aug 24, 2021

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Editor's Note:

On tracing COVID-19 origins, the US government has been making groundless accusations targeting China based on speculation and disinformation, but never on science and facts. The virus origins tracing mission in the US has been led by intelligence departments, which have a notorious record of creating disinformation for politicization purposes, and most of the rumors concocted by the US surround the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Focusing on the rumors and those who are behind the defamation campaign, the Global Times shall publish two in-depth reports on Wednesday and Thursday to expose the lowdown tricks employed in the West' COVID-19 origins campaign.

The groundless claims by Western politicians and media surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology have frequently been disproved by scientists from across the world. In a recent critical review published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell on August 18, 21 renowned international experts once again presented evidence that the scenario of SARS-CoV-2 having been first passed from an animal to a human is much more probable than the disease originating from the Wuhan lab.

The discussion over the origins of the pandemic has become politicized and heated, said Stephen Goldstein, author of the Cell article and evolutionary virologist at University of Utah. "We felt the time was right to take a critical look at all of the available evidence," Goldstein noted, according to a press release published on the university's website on August 19.

It's a pity that some Western countries led by the US remain busy politicizing the pandemic and slandering China with the "lab-leak theory," while ignoring their severe domestic situation, said Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist from Wuhan University. The COVID-19 origins tracing is a rational scientific issue, which "should be decided by scientists instead of politicians," Yang told the Global Times.

Rumors from the US targeting the WIV labs have been circulating since the beginning of the pandemic, trying to portray this Chinese research institution as "the root of all evil."

What are the main rumors spread about the WIV? Who are behind the conspiracy theories? The Global Times listed the following typical COVID-19-related misinformatio in chronological order, which have all been disproved by international authoritative scientists and the Chinese government.

Rumor: 'COVID-19 was created by WIV'

The claim that "SARS-CoV-2 was made or artificially synthesized by the WIV" first emerged in early 2020.

In an article published on January 26, 2020, three days after Wuhan announced a city-wide lockdown, American conservative newspaper the Washington Times quoted Dany Shoham, "a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare," as saying that COVID-19 was probably leaked from the WIV, and was possibly "included in China's biological weapons program."

Following the Washington Times' groundless article, the US started a conspiracy theory war against WIV, with an increasing number of anti-China politicians and media, who might have neither known about the COVID-19 nor WIV, pointing fingers at China for "making the virus."

Republican Senator Tom Cotton echoed the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis in the same month. "I would note that Wuhan has China's only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus," Cotton hinted at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on January 30, 2020.

Then Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai criticized Cotton's remark as "absolutely crazy." Cotton's ridiculous bioweapon assertion was soon refuted by 27 leading medical experts from eight different countries, who published a joint statement in The Lancet on February 29 and indicated that scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed the genomes of SARS-CoV-2, and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus disease originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.

The Wuhan P4 Laboratory is a government cooperation program between China and France, with its design, construction, and management all following international standards, and operations are protected by special facilities and strict protocols. "There is… no factual evidence corroborating recent reports in the US press linking the origins of COVID-19 and the work of the P4 laboratory of Wuhan," an official at French President Emmanuel Macron's office said in April 2020, France24 reported.

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