By AW Siddiqui
The recent tensions between the United States and China are well known. The conflict is seen as a great power struggle between an established superpower and its burgeoning rival. The conflict’s scope ranges from a trade war to disputes over the South China Sea and 5G internet.
Some in Russia believe these tensions have pushed the United States’ government to take drastic actions to achieve its goals.
At the time this content was written, death toll from Coronavirus in China had passed 1,600 and the number of confirmed infections have risen to nearly 67,000, most in Hubei Province.
Many doctors believe that deaths and infections from the current epidemic in China are undercounted because testing facilities at hospitals and laboratories are under severe strain.
The measures put in place in Hubei appear to be “paying off,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, but he warned that the course of outbreaks like these is unpredictable – or is it?
As the number of deaths and infections are increasing, there have been talks of conspiracies - whether the new virus is manmade, and whether this epidemic is an undeclared biological war.
Taking the lead in these talks are some of the Russian experts on TV channels alleging that the coronavirus is a U.S.-creation, and potentially a bioweapon designed to target China.
Igor Nikulin, a former member of the U.N. Commission on Biological and Chemical Weapons, claims he was contacted by Chinese colleagues who believe the coronavirus is man-made.
Nikulin states the following:
It all looks like sabotage. First of all, this is the city of Wuhan – it’s the centre of the country, a major transportation hub, plus the Chinese New Year – hundreds of millions of Chinese were expected to travel around the country to relatives, acquaintances, and so on.
According to a report published in Dimsum Daily February 2, 2020, citing William Ebbs, several Russian scientists believe America created the Wuhan coronavirus to sabotage China in order to make tonnes of money by subsequently coming up with an antidote or vaccine.
Russian media sources suggest the novel disease, provisionally known as 2019-nCoV, could be an American made bio-weapon designed to sabotage China. The claims have had significant airtime on mainstream Russian media and could be part of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to discredit U.S interests in the region.
“The Chinese believe the coronavirus is created by the Americans,” the popular Komsomolskaya Pravda reported, citing as proof that the virus was “genetically shaped in the American laboratories,” the claim that “all the infected are Asians!” and there are “no Europeans.”
Russia’s oldest state-owned news agency, RIA Novosti, reported, “The spread of coronavirus might have been a sabotage, the expert [Nikulin] thinks.”
The RIA Novosti report, citing Nikulin, speculated that U.S. diplomatic staff may have “delivered” the dangerous cargo from the “American lab” to Wuhan.
The economic version of the narrative, published by Topcor.ru, suggested that the ongoing trade war with China has cost the U.S. billions of dollars, and the latter would benefit from the virus undermining the former’s economy.
An alternate version of the narrative, disseminated by katyusha.org, states that the Chinese military is claiming the virus was artificially produced in U.S. laboratories with the goal of breaking China from within. The fringe outlet suggested that the outbreak is essentially a U.S. bioweaponry reconnaissance operation with the goal of testing the capabilities of Chinese biological weapons defences.
Additional outlets referred to statements by pro-Kremlin military expert Igor Nikulin on TV Zvezda, who claimed that the appearance of the virus looked like sabotage. According to Nikulin, the United States actively researches lethal disease vectors to test them within a population while simultaneously developing cures for them. Similar narratives have begun to appear on more mainstream pro-Kremlin outlets, including Pravda TV and Izvestia.
There are unconfirmed stories about biohazard containers that were found buried in the evacuated consulate general in Wuhan, and the PRC security forces have cordoned off other US diplomatic missions in the country, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China has officially demanded United States explaination.
The story mentioned an official statement by the Foreign Ministry saying that the containers were found on January 30 after the US consulate general in Wuhan was evacuated in full on a special board of the US Air Force in connection with the outbreak of a new virus. The search was carried out after Chinese intelligence handed over certain “undeniable materials”, the contents of which have not yet been disclosed.
“Since attempts to get comments on official and closed channels over the course of several days did not lead to clear answers, we decided to move this question to another level and demand an answer publicly. China is also initiating an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council, ”said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.
The department said that a total of eight containers with biohazard labels were found. Xinhua News Agency also published their photo in a military warehouse near the consulate. The boxes were wrapped in two layers of tarpaulin and buried in the backyard of the Consulate General at a depth of one and a half meters. Their contents are now being studied by Chinese military biologists
According to BBC News 7 Feb 2020 coronavirus theories have also featured heavily on Channel One's main political talk show, Vremya Pokazhet (Time Will Tell), only more openly than on news programmes.
Vremya TV which presented an expert who said that the Chinese coronavirus strain has been artificially created, and that US intelligence agencies or American pharmaceutical companies are behind it.
The report also rehashed Kremlin media and officials that the US ran a laboratory in Georgia where it tested a biological weapon on humans – a claimed which has been rejected as false.
The gist is to suggest that various Western actors - pharmaceutical companies, the US or its agencies - are somehow involved in helping to create or spread the virus, or at least in spreading panic about it.
The aim is variously said to be - in the case of "Big Pharma" - to profit from creating a vaccine against the coronavirus or, in the case of the US, to hit the Chinese economy in order to weaken a geopolitical competitor, reported BBC.
Developing viruses in the lab is now an old science, and there is no doubt about US capacities of developing such virus that can target certain race. America is the only country that has 400 military biological laboratories around the world.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a leader of the Russian LDPR, has publicly stated that America could have caused the crisis to undermine Chinese economic power while making tons of money in the process.
Zhirinovsky told Moscow radio that Americans were “surely” behind the outbreak. He suggested pharmacists were gaining billions while the U.S. military reaped an “opportunity to test” weaponizing the virus.
It’s hard to say whether these stories are facts or fiction until decades later when national arrive files will become available, but it will not be a total surprise that there are certain degree of truth in there, given the past records of questionable honesty and integrity of the US government.
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