Politico | ‘Biological Chernobyl’: how China’s secrecy fuelled coronavirus suspicions
- US officials are still debating whether the virus emerged from a Chinese lab. But that’s not stopping Fox News
- Donald Trump’s allies have seized upon theory once promoted only by handful of anti-China hardliners
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Quint Forgey, Natasha Bertrand, Daniel Lippman and Lauren Morello on politico.com on April 17, 2020.
In recent days, US President Donald Trump’s allies have seized upon an alternative origin story for the novel coronavirus: that the disease emerged from inside a Chinese laboratory, not an outdoor market.
The basic narrative reads like a dystopian movie plot, and goes something like this: somehow, the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease first appeared in late 2019. Researchers there were studying dangerous bat coronaviruses, and safety procedures at the facility were not as rigorous as they should have been.
The Chinese government then covered up the incident, blaming a seafood market near the lab for launching the pandemic and refusing to allow any independent investigation.
Variations on this theory, once promoted by only a handful of anti-China hardliners, are now being flogged relentlessly every night on Fox News, the president’s preferred prime-time viewing. Trump himself has made vague allusions to the lab-jailbreak concept.
“More and more we’re hearing the story,” he told reporters when asked about it during a coronavirus task force briefing last week. But other officials, notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have lent it further credence and are now pressing Beijing for answers.