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CHina’s propagandists have found a key new witness to their claim that the crown pandemic did not start in China at all, but was brought to Wuhan from abroad: German virologist Alexander Kekulé. Kekulé didn’t say that at all. But the foreign state television channel CGTN used the hands-free statements that the German scientist had made last week on the ZDF program “Markus Lanz.”
There he explained his thesis that the virus that circulates throughout the world is a genetically modified variant that “actually only appeared in northern Italy.” It is more contagious “than the original Wuhan variant.” When moderator Lanz commented that it sounded exactly like Chinese state propaganda, Kekulé made it clear: “Of course (the virus) comes from China.” CGTN, on the other hand, titled its selective excerpt from the show: “Coronavirus does not come from Wuhan, says prominent German virologist.”
The CGTN video is part of a large-scale campaign that China’s state media is currently using to spread the claim at home and abroad that Sars-CoV-2 was originally imported into Wuhan via foreign frozen food. . “All available evidence would point to this,” wrote the “People’s Daily” last week, reflecting the official opinion of the Communist Party.
The newspaper cited, among other things, an Italian study in which scientists from Milan and Siena want to have shown that Sars-CoV-2 was already circulating in Italy in September 2019. The People’s Daily did not mention that other Italian scientists question this result.
The confusion game is taking effect
He also didn’t say that one of the study’s authors, Giovanni Apolone of the National Cancer Research Institute, made clear that his research was not evidence that the pandemic did not originate in China. “These results only document that the epidemic in China was not discovered in time,” he said a few days ago at a press conference in Milan. However, China’s Xinhua news agency released a video on Monday citing the Italian study as evidence of the frozen food thesis.
The confusion game is working: In a recent Yougov-Cambridge Globalism Project survey, only 52 percent of Chinese surveyed believed that the coronavirus was first discovered in their country. Almost a third believe it appeared for the first time in the United States. This may be related to the fact that Chinese propaganda has long claimed that thousands of American deaths in the wake of the fall 2019 flu wave were actually corona infections.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has been waiting for months for the green light from China for a delegation of international experts to enter to determine the origin of the pandemic. This is considered important in order to more easily prevent a future pandemic. A member of the expert commission, Danish Peter Ben Embarek, said last week that Wuhan experts would like to interview fish market traders who were among the first known to be infected. “We don’t know how the virus jumped from its most likely natural environment, the bat population, to humans,” said Embarek. China, for its part, has urged “all countries” to “intensify their cooperation with the WHO to advance the search for origin.” The State Department spokesman said last week that the search for the origin of the virus “could include numerous countries and areas.” .
