US right-wing media fan virus origin rumor

The US right-wing media and supporters of US President Donald Trump have fanned the latest round of speculation that the novel coronavirus of COVID-19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei province, according to a recent news report on BuzzFeed News.

On April 14, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin published excerpts from two-year-old US State Department communications in which US diplomats described what they saw as safety issues at the Wuhan lab.

On April 15, Fox News published a story claiming COVID-19 "likely" originated in the Wuhan lab.

Following the reports, the right-wing media machine began to roll out unproven articles or supportive pieces for the claim, such as in the Washington Examiner and the American Conservative.

Wilson Center disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz said that putting the blame on a Wuhan lab helps the Trump administration find a scapegoat.

It becomes more politically convenient for Trump and his administration, she said.

Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, commented on Twitter about how the Trump administration has groped to find a direct link between the coronavirus and Chinese labs.

Konyndyk is also critical of the Washington Post's Rogin for publishing excerpts of a two-year-old cable, rather than the cable in its entirety.

"It's irresponsible for political reporters like Rogin [to] uncritically regurgitate a secret 'cable' without asking a single virologist or ecologist or making any attempt to understand the scientific context," tweeted Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen.

Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, said that there was no way this could escape a lab and if this escaped a Wuhan lab, [the researchers] would have all gotten sick.

Racaniello said the two claims — that the virus could be human-made and that it could have escaped from a laboratory — had no scientific backing. "No human could ever design this virus."

"All available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not [a] manipulated or constructed virus in a lab or somewhere else," WHO spokesperson Fadela Chaib said on April 21, echoing the results of a study published in March.