FALSE: DO NOT SHARE
Claim:
COVID-19 was created as a Chinese bioweapon to suppress the Hong Kong protests.
Answer:
False. COVID-19 is thought to have originated in wildlife and was not engineered in a lab.
FURTHER INFORMATION
It is claimed in the video that US chemist and nanoscientist Dr Charles Lieber went to Wuhan in 2013, where he subsequently created a bioweapon (Covid-19) on the orders of the Chinese Government to quell protestors, like those pro-democracy protests recently seen in Hong Kong.
This is false. Whilst Dr Lieber is being investigated by the US Department of Justice due to his links with China and funds he received while working at the Wuhan University of Technology, but has no known links to the Covid-19 outbreak and was allegedly researching battery technology. The video heavily references an unknown and unnamed source who used to work for the Chinese military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has dismissed these “internet rumours” as causing “great harm”.
Covid-19 is a caused by infection by a new type of coronavirus [SARS-CoV-2], genetically related to SARS and MERS which caused previous illness outbreaks in 2003 and 2012. As we have previously written, whilst the origin of Covid-19 has not been confirmed, it is thought to be a naturally occurring virus and was not synthetically engineered in a lab. According to the WHO, the most likely ecological reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2 are bats, and ‘all available evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural animal origin and is not a constructed virus’.
Additionally, the WHO states that ‘many researchers have been able to look at the genomic features of SARS-CoV-2 and have found that evidence does not support that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct. If it were a constructed virus, its genomic sequence would show a mix of known elements. This is not the case’. As the Lancet concludes, ‘Scientists from around the world overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.’
SOURCE
World Health Organisation (WHO): Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report – 32
World Health Organization (WHO): Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report – 94
Reuters: China lab says conspiracy theories hurting efforts to curb virus
Science: Why did a Chinese university hire Charles Lieber to do battery research?
Origins of Claim
FULL TEXT OF CLAIM
“He (unnamed Chinese military source) wrote about the existence of horrid bioweapon in Wuhan and other parts of China, killing millions of people. He made it very clear that he was not talking about the coronavirus, he was talking about a bioweapon. It was developed to suppress the Hong Kong protestors who had been roaming the streets since March 2019… The Chinese Government ordered for the development of a bioweapon that would trigger a rapid development of Parkinson’s disease among the Hong Kong protestors, their cognitive functions would have to be diminished so that they were no longer a threat to the government… Where was this weapon developed? At the Wuhan National Biosecurity Laboratory… The bioweapon was released at the Wuhan animal market by a corrupt employee.”
