An independent U.S. media The Gray Zone has slammed the conspiracy theory spread by some "Trump media" that the novel coronavirus originated from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), saying they never offered "a single piece of concrete evidence to support their claims."
In an investigative report published on Monday, it analyzed in detail how an article by the Washington Post on April 14 story "fished out of the right-wing's political wet market and polished it off for public consumption."
"By planting fake news about Chinese evildoing through anonymous U.S. officials and dodgy document dumps, the White House appears to hope that an escalated conflict abroad will paper over its failures at home," it wrote.
The author of the article in the Washington Post, Josh Rogin, has repeatedly engineered fake news, and he did not cite a single virologist or epidemiologist in the article.
Josh Rogin doesn't hide his anti-China attitude as his recent tweets and articles are filled with "blame the coronavirus on China" content. His "blame the Chinese Communist Party" piece is even pinned on this Twitter profile. The article in question was posted in Mandarin Chinese on the Washington Post, specifically targeting audiences that know Chinese.
The Gray Zone also pointed out that Rogin's hypothesis largely relied on a two-year-ago cable from the U.S. embassy in China, which warned that the work of the Wuhan lab on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission "represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic."
However, the main content of the cable actually contradicted his lurid assertion. In this cable, American officials attached more importance to the value of the lab's research on preventing potential coronavirus outbreaks than security concerns.
For the U.S. embassy officials' visit to the lab, which the columnist claimed "usual," is "extremely common" for international exchanges, rectified the report. Since its opening in 2015, the WIV has received scientists, health experts, and government officials from over a dozen countries.
France, as a joint collaborator of the lab, has strongly condemned reports saying the virus originated in the facility.
"We would like to make it clear that there is to this day no factual evidence corroborating recent reports in the U.S. press linking the origins of COVID-19 and the work of the P4 [or BSL-4] laboratory of Wuhan, China," according to The Gray Zone citing an official at President Emmanuel Macron's office said on April 18.
