By Hu Ping
Hu Ping is a former president of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy, the honorary chief editor of the United States-based Chinese-language political magazine Beijing Spring and a regular contributor to Radio Free Asia. As part of IranWire’s ongoing series on Russian and Chinese disinformation during the pandemic, he considers recent coverage that has muddied the waters on the origin of coronavirus.
On April 23 this year, the New York Times published an article entitled: Amid Signs Coronavirus Came Earlier, Americans Ask: Did I Already Have It?.
The article claimed there are many indications that the novel coronavirus was already prevalent in the United States from as early as January to February 2020.
In recent weeks I have read various news reports that say as early as January or February 2020, or even November or December last year, many people in parts of the US and Italy had contracted influenza or pneumonia-like symptoms, got sick and died.It was speculated afterward that this might in fact have been Covid-19, but people did not know about it at the time and treated it the new coronavirus, but people did not know it at the time. This would mean that the origin of the novel coronavirus outbreak might not have been in Wuhan, China, but somewhere in the United States or Italy instead: that is to say, that the epidemic in China was imported from another country… [continue reading]