Posts viral on social media misrepresent a document published by the US Department of State to falsely claim that the United States government has “almost officially confirmed that coronavirus was leaked from China’s Wuhan laboratory”.
The post goes on to say that the US government has confirmed that “COVID-19 is a biological weapon.”
The tweet was originally posted by Aarti Tikoo Singh, the Foreign and Strategic Affairs Editor for news agency IANS, and was later shared by several people on Twitter and Facebook.
However, the claim is false. The origins of the novel coronavirus are still unknown. The concluding paragraph in the fact sheet shared by people also mentions that “the virus’s origin remains uncertain”.
CLAIM
The claim in the viral posts reads, “Before leaving, the Trump administration, explodes the info bomb—almost officially confirming that Coronavirus leaked from China’s Wuhan laboratory where secret military research was being conducted. In other words, COVID-19 is a biological weapon.”
The same text was copied and posted by several others on Twitter and Facebook.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Upon going through the document linked with the post, we found no mention of the US government officially confirming that coronavirus was leaked from China’s Wuhan laboratory.
The document says, “The US government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus – known as SARS-CoV-2 – was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
It further goes on to add that the “US government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019”.
However, it does not give any evidence nor does it mention if the researchers had caught the novel coronavirus.
The concluding paragraph of the document says, “As the world continues to battle this pandemic – and as WHO investigators begin their work, after more than a year of delays – the virus’s origin remains uncertain.”
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF COVID-19?
It has been over a year since the COVID-19 outbreak and researchers are still not sure about the origins of the virus. A global team of virology experts, appointed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), has gone to Wuhan this month to begin their investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
In November 2020, WHO released their findings from a Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2. In the nine-page document, the organisation says that while bats are a natural reservoir of coronaviruses, it was still early to determine the point of transmission.
“Short term studies will be conducted to better understand how the virus might have started circulating in Wuhan,” the document says.
Previously, a group of researchers found the virus most closely resembled bat viruses and was not man-made.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," they wrote in the journal Nature.
Another report published by as many as 27 non-Chinese scientists in the renowned science journal The Lancet, dismissed the possibility of the virus being artificial.
“The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the report stated.
Similar claims about the man-made nature of the virus were made last year and were debunked by The Quint’s WebQoof team.
Evidently, the fact sheet released by the US Department of State was misrepresented to falsely claim that it had “almost confirmed that Coronavirus was leaked from China’s Wuhan laboratory”.
(Disclaimer: The origin of the virus was still unknown at the time of publishing this article. The WHO is conducting research to find the source of the pandemic.)
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