China: ‘The People’ Demand Treating U.S. as Coronavirus Origin

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday insisted China’s conspiracy theory that the Wuhan coronavirus was created in a U.S. Army bioweapons lab in Ft. Detrick, Maryland, must be investigated before any further examination of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian – an early and outspoken proponent of the conspiracy theory – claimed a petition with five million dubious signatures from “Chinese netizens” accumulated over the past week is proof that investigating Ft. Detrick is the “call of the people.” Quite a few participants in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) orchestrated social media frenzies usually turn out to be “people” in the same sense that C-3PO is.

“The mystery of Fort Detrick remains unsolved,” Zhao declared.

The original version of China’s conspiracy theory held that U.S. soldiers attending the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan brought the American-made coronavirus with them. This theory was pushed hard by Chinese propagandists after the U.S. and other nations that attended the Games began worrying it might have been a “super-spreader” event that brought the coronavirus back to their home turf from Wuhan. Several U.S. lawmakers called for a serious investigation of this possibility in June 2021.

The current mutation of China’s Ft. Detrick conspiracy theory is that U.S. officials used a phony outbreak of “e-cigarette disease” to conceal a coronavirus outbreak in Maryland that began before the coronavirus pandemic erupted in Wuhan. This is supposed to be smoking-gun – or, if you prefer, vaping-gun – proof that the Chinese coronavirus escaped from the Ft. Detrick lab and began ravaging Maryland before it was spread by the evil American military to unsuspecting Wuhan.

No proof exists corroborating this theory. A critical fact the Chinese government has yet to explain to support the theory is that “e-cigarette disease” is actually a form of lung injury, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), meaning it is not contagious. Not a single documented case exists of anyone being diagnosed with “e-cigarette disease” through contact or exposure to another patient, and health workers treating the condition do not use protective gear to avoid lung injury when treating these patients. In contrast, the Chinese coronavirus is highly contagious and requires infectious disease protocol to keep health workers safe.

Flip, flop. Flippity-flop. https://t.co/ZGrI8oYEoU

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 16, 2021

Increasingly frantic communist officials attacked the Wuhan lab leak theory again on Thursday, angrily insisting the Wuhan Institute of Virology has never conducted “gain-of-function research” and none of its researchers became mysteriously ill in 2019, despite reports to the contrary.

“If some countries believe that further investigation in this area should be carried out, then the investigations should be conducted in labs that have not yet been inspected,” sniffed Liang Wannian, leader of China’s side of the joint World Health Organization (W.H.O.) visit to Wuhan in 2021. 

Other Chinese officials on Thursday professed to be “shocked” at the “lack of respect for common sense” and “arrogance” of W.H.O.’s proposal for another visit to Wuhan.

W.H.O. officials, including Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have gingerly presented the second visit proposal as a chance for China to cooperate more fully and dispel lingering doubts about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the CCP angrily refused to allow the new visit and resumed shrieking about the unsolved mystery of Ft. Detrick.