"Where the Coronavirus Bioweapon conspiracy theories really come from"
Where the coronavirus bioweapon conspiracy theories really come from.
"Conspiracy theories infect us faster than the virus itself, it seems."
Experts debunk fringe theory
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...pons-research/
Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that while Chinese officials had expressed public interest in the potential weaponization of biotechnology, a coronavirus would not be a useful weapon.
“Hypothetically, a bioweapon would be designed to be highly targeted in its effects, whereas since its outbreak the coronavirus is already on track to become widespread in China and worldwide,” she said.
Vipin Narang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a message on Twitter that a good bioweapon “in theory has high lethality but low, not [high], communicability” and that spreading such ideas would be “incredibly irresponsible.”
After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, fringe news outlets suggested spuriously that the U.S. Department of Defense had manufactured the virus. In the Soviet Union, military labs did look into whether the virus could be used as a weapon but ultimately abandoned those hopes.
Late Tuesday, Hu Xijin, editor of the nationalistic Global Timesnewspaper, wrote that a conspiracy theory had emerged in China that the United States was responsible for the outbreak. “Their logic: Why always China?” Hu wrote on Twitter. “But most Chinese don’t believe it.”
