Nearly a year after COVID-19 spread around the world, the source of the virus remains a mystery. As the World Health Organisation prepares to launch an international investigation into the Chinese city of Wuhan, China’s state media has begun a new round of COVID-19 origins speculation. This time, the culprit is cold-chain food imports from countries such as Australia.
Novel Coronavirus came from Italy and Spain, according to western scientists not long ago. From novel Coronavirus to Us Military laboratory to Australian steak, Chinese authorities have been trying to deny that novel Coronavirus originated in China, even though novel Coronavirus first broke out in Wuhan, China.
China: Novel Coronavirus originated from Australian steak and other cold chain imported foods
On 6 December 2020, The Global Times, a semi-official nationalist tabloid in China, published an investigation report in its English edition saying that novel Coronavirus could not be ruled out being imported into The South China Seafood Market in Wuhan last year. Novel Coronavirus epidemic diagnosed early in Wuhan was closely related to the south China seafood market in Wuhan. South China seafood market was once considered as one of the novel Coronavirus origins.
Could a novel Coronavirus be the source? Could cold-chain imports have sparked Wuhan early COVID-19 outbreaks? Wuhan imports frozen products from several countries, including “Brazilian and German meat… Australian steak, Chilean cherries, and Ecuadorian seafood,” according to the report. However, the article also admitted that there was no evidence to support the claim.
Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, China has banned imports of beef from a sixth Australian beef supplier since December 7. However, China has not said why it made its latest decision. China has banned imports of beef from five other Australian beef suppliers this year, citing issues with labeling and health certification.
This is not the first time China has dumped the source of the virus on imported cold-chain food and packaging. Since the discovery of a novel Coronavirus from a foreign country by a novel Coronavirus in June this year in the “Xinfa Land” wholesale market of agricultural products, it has been frequently mentioned in Chinese media reports and even in the research papers of Chinese scholars. In fact, after the cluster of infections in the Wholesale markets in Xinfadi, Beijing, new local infections are often traced to “imported frozen food” or packaging.
On October 23, researchers from Tsinghua University, Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other research institutions jointly published a paper in China’s National Science Review entitled “The re-emergence of COVID-19 in Beijing may be caused by cold chain food contamination”. The researchers of the paper revealed that the source of the virus in the epidemic situation was most likely to be imported food in the cold chain of the high-epidemic area outside the country, and proposed that the cold chain transport or novel coronavirus transmission new way.
If previous reports in Chinese media are to explain the reason for the second outbreak of COVID-19 in China, then this new investigation report of Global Times attempts to completely rewrite the novel Coronavirus’s original narrative from Wuhan.
Global Times published a similar article on 26 November saying that “novel Coronavirus” could not be ruled out when it was imported into the South China seafood market in Wuhan last year.
“#COVID19 (Novel Coronavirus) did not begin in Wuhan, central China, but may have entered China through imported cold-chain food and packaging,” the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily said in a Facebook post a day earlier, on November 25.
The Chinese center for disease control and prevention epidemiological chief expert wu zun friends recently in an interview with the media also did say, “because of Beijing xinfadi, dalian and Qingdao the several outbreaks are caused by seafood, so we came up with the earliest those outbreaks in wuhan is in the south China seafood market, was caused by imported seafood too, this also gives us a hint, make we have a new idea, new technical direction.”
Fact: This new round of dumping has to do with an upcoming WHO investigation
Many media outlets have speculated that China’s new outbreak of the virus is related to the World Health Organization’s upcoming investigation in Wuhan, and that the Communist Party seems’ eager to muddy the waters. ‘
In May, WHO member States agreed to urge WHO to assist in the investigation of the novel Coronavirus “source and route of human-to-human transmission”. While experts say an investigation into the source of the virus is crucial and the best hope of avoiding the next pandemic, Chinese officials have been slow and even obstructive to international experts investigating the source. Australia was the first country to call for an independent investigation into the origin of COVID-19, leading to a sharp reversal in relations with China.
On November 27, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebrev made it clear that international experts would be sent to Wuhan to investigate the origin of the virus. This is nearly a year after the outbreak of COVID-19, and the international experts have confirmed that they have access to wuhan to investigate the source of the COVID-19 outbreak. However, Tedros did not specify when the team of international experts would be in Wuhan. But, according to the leaked agreement, even if international experts arrive in China, the wuhan field trip will be conducted by Chinese scientists.
With regard to novel Coronavirus that may have originated from frozen food packaging, probably only China currently considers frozen food packaging to be at risk of transmission of COVID-19. The WORLD Health Organization has previously said that the risk of COVID-19 infection through frozen food is low. “There is no evidence at this time of a connection between novel Coronavirus treatment and ingestion,” the CDC said.
In fact, China’s own testing results also showed that “novel Coronavirus in the market circulation has a very low risk of contamination”. According to China’s official Xinhua News Agency on October 17, since China since June to strengthen the detection of food cold chain, as of September 15, the country 24 provinces, submit it to the 2.98 million test result of cold-chain food and packaging samples of 670000 copies, from personnel of course of sample 1.24 million, 1.07 million environmental samples, only detected in 22 pieces of food and packaging will be coronavirus nucleic acid positive.
Li Ning, deputy director of the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment, explained at a press conference on the joint prevention and control mechanism held by The State Council in November that so far, the positive rate of spot checks nationwide has been 0.48 per 10,000 people, and the focus has been on food packaging.
The Xinhua report added: “Existing research and prevention and control practices show that COVID-19 is not a foodborne disease, and no cases of infection through food intake have been found. So far, there have been no cases of consumer infection from exposure to contaminated cold chain seafood, and the risk of infection for Chinese consumers is extremely low.”
The paper in the National Science Review didn’t draw a clear conclusion either. The editor of the journal seemed to imply that he had published the paper because of its “sensationalism”.
“It’s such a beautiful theory,” he said. Can we publish it if it contains unresolved issues? We struggled with it for a long time and decided to publish it because it was really, really beautiful.”
In the absence of conclusive evidence, novel Coronavirus detection of imported cold chain food packaging in China has aroused some controversy. Cold-chain food exporters question the science behind it and whether it constitutes an unfair trade barrier.
Novel Coronavirus originated in northern Italy, not Wuhan
In addition to blaming frozen food for the origin of novel Coronavirus, state media in China recently referred the virus source to Italy by famous German virologist Alexander Kekule.
In late November and early December, Chinese media reported that Kekule said that 99.5% of the novel coronavirus cases currently circulating globally can be traced to a novel coronavirus mutant strain from northern Italy that did not originate in Wuhan, China.
The report also states that when novel Coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, the world, including China, did not know what it was. When the virus spread in northern Italy, The Italians ignored warnings from China for a long time. The report went on to say that although China had discovered the virus, issued warnings and demonstrated ways to stop its spread, other countries had not adopted it in a timely manner, resulting in the spread of the virus not being stopped.
Kekule became a celebrity in the Chinese media. His picture in “Clean China!” Under the headline appeared on Chinese news websites. Chinese Internet users went wild. The Internet is full of thumb ups such as “a billion people will pay you thumb up” and “only you can be brutally honest”.
Fact: Taken out of context by Chinese media, the scientist himself contradicts
However, the statement was taken out of context by The Chinese media, and Kekule himself later took to Twitter to express his disapproval of China’s use of him for propaganda.
What most Chinese media did not report was that Kekule, in a later interview, explained that the virus “of course came from China, imported from China to Italy, where it mutated.” Because the G variant is more infectious, it has spread quickly around the world. Although some Chinese media reported kekule’s remarks with relative accuracy, the Chinese audience did not seem to accept the latter sentence.
Kekule himself posted on His Twitter account on December 1, saying: “The Chinese media used the appearance of variant G in Italy for propaganda purposes. Novel Coronavirus epidemic began in China and its outbreak may even have been covered in its infancy.”
It is not the first time that Chinese media have used western scholars’ research reports to describe China as a “dumping ground”. In fact, whenever a study on the origin of the virus comes out, the Chinese media will seize every possible opportunity to dump the origin of the virus on other countries, regardless of the fact that the study may not be peer-reviewed and there are still major controversies in the scientific community.
A test by Italian researchers has also been picked up by Chinese media. In November, Researchers in Italy said they tested blood samples from 959 volunteers participating in a lung cancer screening trial between September and March of this year and found novel Coronavirus antibodies in 111, including four volunteers who had provided blood samples in early October of last year, meaning they may have been infected with novel Coronavirus last September. The Chinese media immediately reported, “New Study: Novel Coronavirus began to spread in Italy last September”.
In June, the University of Barcelona, Spain, announced that a research team led by the university had identified a Novel Coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona wastewater taken last March. Chinese media immediately reported that “novel Coronavirus may originate in Spain”, ignoring that the study had not received peer review, which was controversial in the academic world.
Francois Balloux, a geneticist at University College London, said on Twitter: “In the absence of the necessary review and consideration of the broader available evidence, some claims supported by untenable evidence have been widely reported.” Even if the virus appeared in Italy in September, it does not necessarily mean it originated there, he said.
“One strong piece of evidence is that the closest thing we know to SARS-COV-2 so far is that it was transmitted in bats in China,” Balukes told Reuters. Over time, the source is still likely to be in East Asia, most likely China, and then spread to other parts of the world.”
A study published on November 30th by scientists from America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was also used by China. The United States reports that novel Coronavirus infection was found in 106 of 7,389 blood donation samples collected by the American Red Cross from residents of nine states across the United States. These blood samples were collected by Red Cross on 13 December 2019 solstice during 17 January 2020 and sent to CDC for testing to see if there are antibodies against novel coronavirus.
Chinese media reported that this indicates that the NOVEL Coronavirus case in the US is weeks ahead of China and is already popular in the winter of 2019. The fact is that China’s Wuhan Health Commission has reported a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province, but the actual outbreak of the virus in China was much earlier than officially reported.
A report in the South China Morning Post on March 13 confirmed this. The report said unpublished government data seen by the newspaper showed that a 55-year-old patient from Hubei province may have been the first person to contract COVID-19 on Nov. 17.
CNN released an exclusive report on December 1, revealing the contents of an internal document leaked from the Hubei CDC. In December 2019, several places in Hubei province saw a major flu outbreak, with the number of flu cases in the first week of December 20 times that of the same period last year, according to the documents. The worst are Yichang, Xianning and Wuhan.
Interestingly, when the study found that D614Gnovel Coronavirus variant strain, also known as the “G variant” mentioned above, was first discovered in China and then spread to Europe and The United States, Chinese state media did not report it. Chinese reports say the mutant strain, which is more than 10 times more potent, has been found in Malaysia and India.
China: Novel Coronavirus may come from India
Chinese media in late November suggested that the virus might have come from India also came from a study by Chinese researchers, but the Chinese media promoted it with the help of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. In the Chinese press, the Lancet paper has once again “cleared China up”.
Chinese media reported that the Lancet published a paper on its website in which it made clear that the COVID-19 outbreak started in the “Indian subcontinent”, namely India and Bangladesh, rather than Wuhan.
The authors of the report said they traced the origin of the virus based on phylogenetic analysis and found that the virus probably originated in India in the summer of 2019, passed from animal to human through water containing the virus, and then passed to Wuhan without anyone noticing before the first case occurred in Wuhan.
According to the report, the virus DNA has very small changes in the process of replication, using genetic analysis and looking at DNA mutations, you can find the virus sample with the least degree of mutation, where the sample may be the source of the virus.
India and Bangladesh were found to have the least mutation, so they should be the source of the virus. In addition to India and Bangladesh, the report suspects the United States, Australia, Italy, Russia, Greece and the Czech Republic as the source of the virus. The report ruled out China as the source of the virus.
The report also puts forward a theory that the second-longest heat wave on record in north-central India and Pakistan in May and June 2019 created a water shortage in the region, causing wildlife to fight for water and increasing human contact with wildlife. The team believes the virus may have taken the opportunity to spread around the world until it was discovered in Wuhan in December 2019.
The report also pointed out that the virus may have spread to Europe before entering China, so a global pandemic is inevitable, and Wuhan is just one link in the global spread of the virus.
The team noted that based on the low mutation from novel Coronavirus, they found the least mutated strain in eight countries: Australia, Bangladesh, Greece, USA, Russia, Italy, India and Czech Republic.
Fact: The paper has not been fully reviewed by the peer, it is just a “guess” and has been removed from the shelves
The paper “Novel Coronavirus The Early Cryptic Transmission and Evolution of SARS-Cov-2 in Human Hosts” was not published in The Lancet, but only on The Lancet’s pre-print platform on SSRN, which means that this paper has not yet been fully reviewed. This paper is no longer available on SSRN’s platform.
However, the South China Morning Post reports that parts of the paper have been peer-reviewed and published in the journal Molecular Phylogeny and Evolution.
The authors of the paper are from the Shanghai Life Science Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They express the hope that their work can provide some clues and new ideas for the novel Coronavirus research and prevention and control. The true origin of virus is still an unsolved mystery, which needs to be continuously revealed through research.
The authors of the paper told the South China Morning Post that their team welcomes the scientific community to review their paper, which is the focus of open academic discussion and helps establish scientific conclusions. “Only in this way can the conclusions of the paper be properly refuted or accepted,” he said.
The paper was first firmly rejected by Indian scientists, who even began to doubt the rigour of the Lancet study. Experts in other countries also called the study “flawed” and its approach “inherently biased.”
Novel Coronavirus was made by US Army and brought to Wuhan by US Army
This is one of the earliest conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus circulating during COVID-19.
In early May, China’s official People’s Daily and China Daily ran a series of questions demanding an explanation of the closure of the U.S. Military biological laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
The People’s Daily article said, “in the United States, some people think that there is more than one evidence that fort detrick last August the cause of the emergency shut down is very suspicious, that there may be will be the source of coronavirus, and caused a flu pandemic, qiu dong season in the United States after the virus was introduced to China by U.S. soldiers in wuhan military games athletes, after the virus mutates to explode again. Ask an expert to answer “.
Truth: Pro-Russia agencies create conspiracy theories. Zhao Lijian promotes them
Global Research Canada, the Kremlin-backed organisation that initially linked Fort Detrik to the source of COVID-19 transmission, said: “It was the Russian government that was responsible. The website published an article in March entitled “Novel Coronavirus: More Evidence of Virus Origin in USA”, stating that the original source of the novel Coronavirus may have been the United States Military Biological Warfare Laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md. The article has now been deleted and cannot be found on the website.
The article received global attention thanks to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. On March 12, the day after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the outbreak of the pandemic, Zhao retweeted a tweet that said “it may have been the US military that brought the virus to China”. Zhao’s tweet was quickly retweeted by the diplomatic accounts of more than a dozen Chinese embassies. Zhao’s tweet provoked outrage in the US. The most immediate result is that Novel Coronavirus has been described by President Trump for some time as a “China virus.”
At fort detrick, the base of the army medical research institute of infectious diseases laboratory really was shut down last year, the reason is “fort detrick, steam sterilization factory failed”, not “enough perfect system on their level of maximum safe laboratory wastewater purification”, thus failed to pass the federal centers for disease control and prevention of the security check. On March 27, fort Detrik Base De III and IV Biosafety Laboratories had fully resumed work on infectious viruses, including the novel Coronavirus study.
The conspiracy theory has several paradoxes. If there was a leak at the Fort Detrick lab, the Fort Detrick accident occurred almost eight months before Frederick County, Maryland, where it is located, announced its first confirmed case. Fort Detrick was closed last July, and The first confirmed case in Frederick County, Md., where Fort Detrick is located, was discovered March 16.
If the US military deliberately brought the virus into Wuhan, then the US now has 16.49 million people infected with the virus and more than 300,000 people have died. How to explain the original intention of the US?
Even so, the conspiracy theory has not gone away in China. The global Times article “Does Epidemic in South China’s Seafood Market Originate from Imported Seafood?” ‘A significant number of the people they interviewed believe that U.S. servicemen brought the virus to Wuhan last October while attending the Wuhan Military Games,’ the English-language article said.
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