China, Russia: Virus came from Ukraine, new study: No, from a lab in Wuhan

CCP is using Russian stories about Americans who created viruses in Ukraine to respond to new official claims that the COVID-19 virus was created in a Chinese laboratory.

by Massimo Introfini

In the past 48 hours, a torrent of Russian and Chinese propaganda has hit social media and some electronic and print media where fellow travelers, if not helpful fools, work on behalf of Putin and Xi Jinping. The propagandist anxiously asserts that Russian forces have found evidence of US military-controlled laboratories in Ukraine producing deadly viruses.

China immediately issued this claim at the highest level, through the State Department. The spokesperson dismissed the claim that the COVID-19 virus was made by Americans in Ukraine, but again noted that it may have been produced in a laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Social media accounts associated with CCP are not shy, publicly accusing the United States of creating the COVID-19 virus in Ukraine.

There is a history of this campaign that some outside Italy may have missed. On March 7, a full page of the most authoritative Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, published an interview with Giorgio Palo, Professor of Virology and Microbiology at the University of Padua and President of AIFA, Italy’s national authority for pharmacy.

Palù, who is also the former president of the European Society of Virology, explained that the highly technical paper on new discoveries about the COVID-19 virus, which he co-authored and just published in Frontiers in Virology, is in fact implying that the theory that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory It has now been greatly enhanced. Ballou even claimed that the probability that the characteristics of the virus evolved naturally is “one in a trillion”.

Of course, as a scientist, Palù called for more research in China to confirm the theory, and other scholars disagreed with him. However, ‘Corriere della Sera’ explained in non-academic terms what just happened, writing that ‘the idea that the virus was released by chance from the lab’ [in Wuhan, zoals het artikel later vermeldt] He had escaped, now became more solid’.

Perhaps not coincidentally, on the same day, several Chinese speakers attacked the study co-authored by the head of the Italian National Pharmaceutical Authority and supported the Russian allegations about Ukrainian laboratories. In fact, the campaign in China was so well organized that within hours, “COVID-19 and Ukrainian laboratories” had emerged as a major topic on Chinese social media Weibo and WeChat.

What applies to US-supported laboratories in Ukraine? next to nothing. In 2005, the United States signed an agreement with Ukraine to support the modernization of the Disease Prevention and Control System, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) model we all knew during COVID-19. Epidemic . Laboratories dedicated to disease research and prevention are run by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, not by the United States, and certainly not by the US military.

Russian and Chinese claims that these are US military facilities and that they are working to prepare biological weapons have been described by AFP and other high-quality media as fake news.

What is sadly true is that Russia bombed some of these centers that played a vital role in the fight against COVID-19 in Ukraine, as well as hospitals and other health facilities.

Massimo Introfini

Massimo Introvini (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian religious sociologist. He is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Antrovini is the author of nearly 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the principal author of the Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research in Religion and on the board of directors of the University of California Press Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he was “Representative to Combat Racism, Xenophobia and Discrimination, with a Special Focus on Discrimination against Christians and Members of Other Religions” at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015, he chaired the Observatory of Religious Freedom, which was set up by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to monitor religious freedom issues on a global scale.