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China is pushing its own coronavirus lab leak theory in latest battle of narratives
- Beijing is seeking to counter the hypothesis that the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
- Diplomats and state media are calling for US military base Fort Detrick to be investigated in a ‘new kind of tit-for-tat’
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Call it a tale of two laboratories: the Fort Detrick Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in the US, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and a competing narrative about the origins of Covid-19.
Odds are that most Americans have never heard of Fort Detrick, about an hour’s drive from Washington and the original home of the US biological weapons programme.
But hundreds of millions of Chinese netizens are familiar with the Detrick name and its supposed links to Covid-19, mostly thanks to China’s so-called Wolf Warrior diplomats.
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They have said dozens of times in social media posts and press conferences that Fort Detrick, half a world away from China in the state of Maryland, needs to be investigated as a potential source of the virus.
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Why is China peddling a coronavirus conspiracy theory?
Why is China peddling a coronavirus conspiracy theory?
“Mysterious EVALI [e-cigarette or vaping-use associated lung injury] broke out in Wisconsin in July 2019 with symptoms almost identical to those of Covid-19. The place of outbreak is within 1-hour drive from #fortdetrick,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Twitter on June 22.
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Hua and two of her colleagues at the ministry – Zhao Lijian and Wang Wenbin – have called for investigations into Fort Detrick a total of 33 times at official press conferences. The last 27 mentions have come since US President Joe Biden took office in January, according to foreign ministry transcripts reviewed by the South China Morning Post.
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