Mick Hartley

On China's continuing attempts to discredit the lab-leak hypothesis:

China’s state media have been accused of spreading fake news and attempting to discredit the World Health Organisation after quoting a Swiss biologist who does not appear to exist.

Media outlets including the People’s Daily, China Daily and the state-run CGTN television network had widely quoted “Wilson Edwards”, who was said to have claimed that the US government had pressured the WHO to investigate the theory that Covid-19 was first leaked by a laboratory in Wuhan.

But references to Edwards were removed from media websites today after the Swiss embassy said there was no Swiss citizen by that name and that it could find no academic articles by him.

“If you exist, we would like to meet you! But it is more likely that this is a [piece of] fake news, and we call on the Chinese press and netizens to take down the posts,” the embassy said.

The incident shows the lengths the Chinese state media are willing to go to to trumpet the official line that Washington is politicising the search for the origin of the coronavirus, which many suspect was leaked from a Chinese lab in the city of Wuhan, where the first Covid-19 cases were reported in December 2019.

A Facebook page set up in Edwards’s name on July 24 suggested that he was from Bern, the Swiss capital, and featured a profile picture of the Radcliffe Camera building at Oxford University, as if to burnish his academic credentials.

In the only post on the account, also published on July 24, Edwards accused the American government of pressuring the WHO to put US experts on the team investigating the theory. The post also claimed that President Biden would “spare no efforts” to rebuild US influences in the organisation.

The People’s Daily and other outlets then quoted Edwards in its reports.

“Unfortunately, Washington’s re-entry has brought geopolitical competition to the science-spearheaded world body,” the scientist apparently told The People’s Daily, the flagship party mouthpiece, and expressed “the disappointment of the international scientific community toward the US”.

After the embassy’s statement yesterday the Facebook account under his name was deleted.

Animosity between Beijing and Washington has intensified in recent months, with the US government alleging the so-called “lab leak” scenario is likely.

Beijing has rejected plans by the WHO to send a second team of experts to the country to investigate the possibility that the virus might have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was studying coronaviruses in bats and other animals.

The Chinese government has called for an inquiry into US biological labs, claiming that Covid-19 may have emerged in Fort Detrick in Maryland.

All very odd. Surely Wilson Edwards is a most unlikely name for a Swiss scientist. I suppose, as this was for internal use, Chinese readers would be unaware of the difference between Wilson Edwards and, say, Wolfgang Schmidt – just as a picture of the Radcliffe Camera would probably just signal Europe in general rather than Oxford. Still, it suggests that their intelligence services are not always that smart…