COVID-19 misinformation by China
"[5] Chris Buckley and Steven Lee Myers wrote in the New York Times that "The government's initial handling of the epidemic allowed the virus to gain a tenacious hold.
At critical moments, officials chose to put secrecy and order ahead of openly confronting the growing crisis to avoid public alarm and political embarrassment.
[6] In December 2020, the BBC published a retrospective into how Chinese state media and China's online government censors had suppressed negative information and propagandized what was reported.
Wang Guangbao, who is a Chinese surgeon and science writer, later said that by 1 January, people in medical circles thought that a SARS-like virus might be spreading, but the police warning discouraged them from talking openly about it.
Health and governance experts place much of the blame on higher-level officials, as local authorities in China can be punished for reporting bad news.
[18] However, at this time the high prevalence of human-to-human transmission was evident to doctors and other health workers, but they were forbidden to express their concerns in public.
[21][22] On 26 January 2020, the editor of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), tweeted a claim that the first building of the Huoshenshan Hospital had been completed in only 16 hours.
[24] On 15 February 2020, China's paramount leader and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping published an article which claimed he had learned of the epidemic on 7 January 2020 and had the same day issued a request for information on activities to contain the spread of the disease.
"[30] In March 2020, Chinese state media propagated the theory that the spread of the virus may have started in Italy before the Wuhan outbreak, pointing to an interview Italian doctor Giuseppe Remuzzi gave to National Public Radio, wherein he mentioned reports of unusual pneumonia cases dating back to November and December 2019.
[32] In November 2020, Chinese state media propagated a misleading account of statements by World Health Organization's top emergency director Michael Ryan, speculating that the virus could have originated outside of China.
[37] In December 2020, the People's Daily featured a study by scientists associated with the state-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences positing that the earliest human-to-human transmission occurred on the Indian subcontinent three to four months before the Wuhan outbreak.
[40][41] A preliminary analysis of this data was reviewed by the international research community, which said that it made an animal origin (especially the common raccoon-dog as an intermediate host) much more likely.
[41] On 12 March 2020, two spokesmen for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian and Geng Shuang, alleged at a press conference that Western powers may have "bio-engineered" the coronavirus, alluding to the US government, but more specifically to the US Army as having created and spread the virus.
[43] In January 2021, Hua Chunying renewed the conspiracy theory from Zhao and Geng that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in the United States from the U.S. military biology laboratory Fort Detrick.
This conspiracy theory quickly went trending on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, and Hua continued to refer to it on Twitter, while asking the government of the United States to open up Fort Detrick for further investigation to determine if it is the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
[46] There is evidence that the Chinese government has made a vigorous effort to play down its early failures in the crisis and to mitigate the damage it has wrought to its image, by claiming the virus originated outside of China.
Chinese state media also misrepresented statements from Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization's emergency director, insinuating that the virus may have originated outside of China.
[52] At a press conference on 12 March 2020, two spokesmen for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian and Geng Shuang, promoted the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus had been "bio-engineered" by Western powers and suggested that the US government, specifically the US Army, had spread the virus.
"[61] In May 2020, Twitter placed fact-check labels on two of the Chinese government tweets which had falsely suggested that the virus originated in the US and was brought to China by the Americans.
[28][63][64] In October 2021, a University of Oxford researcher found that Chinese state media accounts spread a theory that the virus originated from American lobsters from Maine.
[65] In March 2022, China Daily and Global Times republished an article by the British conspiracy website The Exposé which falsely claimed COVID-19 was created by Moderna.
Edzard Ernst, a retired UK-based researcher of complementary medicines is quoted in the journal Nature stating, "For TCM there is no good evidence and therefore its use is not just unjustified, but dangerous.
[79] Nick Monaco, the research director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at Institute for the Future, analyzed the posts and concluded that the majority appear to have come from ordinary users in China, not the state.
