As the novel coronavirus spread from China to the rest of the world, dealing body blows to countries in Europe and roiling the U.S. economy, a state-owned Russian news site floated some theories on the virus’ origin: It may be the creation of the U.S. military, the site speculated; or perhaps George Soros, Bill Gates, or American pharmaceutical companies.
The article this month on the website of the publication Zvezda claimed, bizarrely, that the coronavirus “affects only members of the Mongol race,” and “such suspicious selectivity raises questions from experts.” Among the theories it floated were that Soros, a frequent Russian propaganda bogeyman, helped finance a lab in Wuhan, China, that developed and released the virus. “11 million people, and China to blame if the virus spreads,” Zvezda quotes one “expert” as saying. “The U.S. and Soros will be off the hook completely. This is a really great plan.”
These sorts of claims are standard fare for viral conspiracy theories and disinformation amid a high-profile crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, such conspiracy theorists also blamed Soros, and an oddly similar-sounding bioweapons lab in Sierra Leone, for the outbreak of the Ebola virus in 2014.
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The same internet cranks are making similar claims about the coronavirus. What sets the Zvezda story apart, though, is its parent organization—the news outlet is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
In that capacity, it’s pointing the finger at all the usual suspects. In addition to Soros, the Zvezda piece claims that Microsoft founder Bill Gates must have had foreknowledge about the coronavirus outbreak because the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charitable group, took part in a coronavirus pandemic simulation last year.
“This cannot be a coincidence,” Dmitry Zhuravlev, the director of the Moscow-based Institute for Regional Problems, was quoted as saying by Zvezda. “When the exercises were conducted, the coronavirus did not exist. Either it must be Nostradamus, or the person who created it. Therefore, these exercises are no longer even indirectly, but directly confirm Gates’s involvement in this story.” (In fact, coronavirus refers to a large family of viruses, not just the one that causes COVID-19, that was well known to the global health community before the current outbreak.)
The Zvezda article also floated the possibility that U.S. pharmaceutical companies caused the Wuhan outbreak in order to profit from an eventual treatment. Another potential culprit: the media. “One thing is clear, those who benefit from the disease will continue to fuel mass hysteria,” Zvezda wrote. “You can earn not only money, but also subscribers.”
China has also played up conspiracy theories casting blame on the U.S. for the virus in a move designed to shift culpability from the People’s Republic, where the outbreak began. The move has infuriated the State Department, with Secretary Mike Pompeo telling Yang Jiechi, the director of the Chinese Communist Party’s Office of Foreign Affairs, that “this is not the time to spread disinformation and outlandish rumors.”
Chinese netizens and state-run media have seized on old news and obscure posts in order to blame the U.S. military for the coronavirus, a move that has spawned a viral Facebook meme in the West.
A poster going by the handle “B.Z.” used the White House petition site “We the People” to demand the government “clarify whether the laboratory is the research unit for the new coronavirus ‘COVID19’ and whether there is a virus leak.” The White House site allows anyone to post and vote on petitions, like a federal version of a comments section.
The original post garnered little attention. Within the first two days of its March 10 posting, the petition received just a little over 100 votes, making it one of the least noticed petitions on the site.
It recites a chronology of unconnected events to support the false claim that Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army Medical Command installation in Maryland, had been shut down because of a coronavirus leak. One of the events cited in the petition, an August 2019 shutdown of Detrick over safety concerns, surfaced in a series of Chinese-language social media posts and news articles in late February and early March with the suggestion that the shutdown could somehow account for the coronavirus outbreak. The internet in China is highly regulated, and regulators cracked down on rumors and dissent as the virus swept through the mainland, but the wild conspiracy theorizing about the U.S. appears to have drawn little censorship.
The White House petition received scant attention in Western media until Chinese state media stepped in.
Huanqiu, the Mandarin-language version of China’s aggressively trollish Global Times news outlet, wrote up the petition just a day after it appeared and followed up with a subsequent version on its English-language site.
That coverage appears to have spawned a viral Facebook copypasta that mimics the original White House petition. The posts, often beginning with a preamble that it was “COPIED with permission,” rattles off the same chronology of events listed in the White House petition and has appeared, in different forms, on at least 17 Facebook pages and posts in 60 Facebook groups.
Users sharing the meme include fan pages for Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter Sara Duterte-Carpio, groups promoting China’s belt-and-road development initiative, Xi Jingping fans, and anti-vaccination activists. Facebook groups aimed at audiences from Nigeria and Kashmir to the U.K., Singapore, and Shia Muslims.
A Chinese diplomat even stepped in to amplify the fake Detrick lab conspiracy. When Global Research—a site notorious for its collection of anti-imperialist cranks and truthers—posted an article that referenced the Detrick closure, Lijian Zhao, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, called the post “very much important to each and every one of us” and urged his nearly 400,000 Twitter followers to “Please read and retweet.” A number of China’s ambassadors around the globe obliged.
That high-level Chinese disinformation campaign drew a swift rebuke from the Pentagon. “As a global crisis, COVID-19 [should] be an area of cooperation between nations,” tweeted Defense Department spokeswoman Alyssa Farah. “Instead, the Communist Party of China has chosen to promulgate false & absurd conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19 blaming U.S. service members.”
Some notable Chinese allies are nevertheless getting in on the game as well. In early February, Hassnain Javed, an adviser to Pakistan’s Ministry of Industries and Production and a self-described “sinologist,” wrote a column on coronavirus for the country’s Daily Times newspaper. “Everything seemingly points to bio-warfare being waged against China,” Javed wrote of the virus. “I would not be surprised if both the US Military and the CIA were directly involved in the development of the deadly coronavirus strain.”
As it turns out, that column was entirely copied from the transcript of a video created about a week earlier by a YouTube conspiracy theory channel called The Atlantis Report. The original video appears to have been removed after it was spotlighted in Mother Jones last month. But copies of the video remain active and accessible on YouTube.
Indeed, just days after it was uploaded, Vicente Soto III, the leader of the Philippines Senate, used his speaking time at a legislative hearing in Manila to play the video, nearly in its entirety. “I have received a report concerning this particular disease,” Soto said of the video. “I think it’s somehow very interesting.”
