China Revives Conspiracy Theory Coronavirus Came from Maryland as Wuhan Lab Suspicion Grows

The Chinese Communist government erupted in fury on Tuesday over discussion of the probable origin of the coronavirus at the virus laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Chinese officials sputtered insults at every Western authority promoting the lab leak theory and insisted China has done nothing to impede the global hunt for the true origin of the coronavirus.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday blasted Nicholas Burns, the American ambassador to China, for saying Beijing should be “more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the [Chinese coronavirus] crisis.”

Burns was inspired to criticize China’s obfuscation by the U.S. Energy Department’s new classified intelligence report, which concludes the pandemic probably originated in the laboratory at Wuhan.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning responded by laughably insisting China has been “open and transparent, and shared information and data on [coronavirus] with the international community in a timely manner.”

“China is the only country that has invited more than once WHO expert groups to come into the country to conduct joint origins study. China has shared more data and research findings on SARS-CoV-2 origins study than any other country, making important contribution to global origins-tracing,” she said.

In truth, China has consistently destroyed evidence and denied access to vital information, a fact the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) was reluctantly forced to admit after Beijing turned the long-delayed visit by W.H.O. investigators to Wuhan in early 2021 into a stage-managed farce.

W.H.O. formally abandoned the search for the virus’s origins two weeks ago, expressly because China has effectively obstructed the investigation. W.H.O. promised for years to conduct a more thorough follow-up to the disastrous 2021 Wuhan trip, but China prevented it from occurring.

Mao then trotted out China’s lunatic conspiracy theory that the virus was secretly created by the U.S. military in Maryland and dropped on Wuhan like a biological bomb.

“It is the U.S. who should respond to the world’s questions and concerns over Fort Detrick and its military and biological labs across the world. By politicizing the issue, the U.S. will not succeed in discrediting China. Instead, it will only hurt the U.S.’s own credibility,” she railed.

China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday rolled out another conspiracy theory, in which the Biden administration tasked all of its agencies to drop “dirt bombs” on China to tee up the Republican majority in the House of Representatives for a big attack on Beijing:

Just after the hype around the “unidentified flying objects incident” died down a little bit, Washington has begun slandering China, claiming that Beijing could possibly provide “lethal weapons” to Russia. Now, it has brought up the virus origins tracing issue again. The US has almost seamlessly linked its production and supply of anti-China topics. American politicians have become very good at playing such tricks.

It’s easy to fabricate rumors but it takes lots of time, energy and resources to refute them, not to mention that the US is using state apparatus to create and spread rumors. They simply do not listen to China’s fact-based responses and clarifications. After several rounds, the US society’s perception of China has been poisoned once again, which has led to the entire country being kidnapped. This has left the US government with less and less room to maneuver in its China policy, leading to a spiral of escalating tensions in US-China relations.

In the past two years, the virus origins tracing issue has been used by US politicians as an omnipotent political tool that can be brought up at any time to disgust people due to its unverifiable and difficult to disprove nature. To be frank, “low confidence” basically means baseless. It is quite inappropriate that the tracing of the virus origins is carried out by the Energy Department. Its unfounded conclusions have inexplicably attracted a lot of attention, indicating some people have seen the timing to manipulate the issue. 

As far as the Global Times was concerned, the universally discredited W.H.O. trip to Wuhan — which was such an embarrassment that W.H.O. dithered for months over even releasing a report on it — was the only investigation of China’s virus labs that will ever be needed.

“Historical experience tells the world that no matter how many lies Washington spreads and how many humanitarian disasters it causes, its political elites and media may not even blush. Otherwise, how could this shameful political farce be staged one by one?” the editorial concluded.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that his agency also believes “the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” with an even higher degree of confidence than the Energy Department attached to the report that infuriated Beijing.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry dutifully slammed Wray, repeating its boilerplate about China’s mythical cooperation with coronavirus investigators and insisting all further questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology are just “political manipulation.”

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning once again brought up Beijing’s eye-rolling lunacy about Ft. Detrick, Maryland, and demanded the world community take it as seriously as the Wuhan lab leak theory

“Many have raised questions and concerns about U.S. bio-military bases at Fort Detrick and around the world. The US should work with the W.H.O. to invite experts from the world to the U.S. for origins-tracing study as soon as possible, and share the research result with the international community in a timely, open and transparent manner,” she said.