One report among many that supports the Chinese hypothesis
"We raced against time and were the first country to report cases to the world," Wang said in an interview with Chinese media published on Friday. He argued that, contrary to prevailing opinion, China's own outbreak of the disease was not exclusively to blame for the global pandemic.
More and more research suggests that the pandemic was likely to have been caused by separate outbreaks in multiple places in the world.
The first cluster of Covid-19 cases was reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan on December 31, 2019; and over the next year the highly contagious virus spread to the rest of the world, resulting in 84.1 million confirmed cases and more than 1.83 million deaths so far.
Comment: That's the 'official story', and it contradicts what the Chinese believe happened. We agree with them, by the way, as we noticed when all this hysteria began that clusters of 'strange new pneumonia-like illnesses' had actually popped up globally in late 2019.
Despite the fact that the precise origins of the coronavirus remain unclear, the outgoing President Donald Trump administration has been blaming the pandemic on China. Accusations leveled against Beijing have ranged from a cover-up of the initial outbreak to claims that the virus was human-made and somehow leaked from a Chinese laboratory.
Comment: This is rank projection for domestic political purposes. Sars-CoV-2 almost certainly originated in an American laboratory.
Trump has repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as the "Chinese virus," insisting that Beijing should be held accountable for it.
"We are on the front line of the struggle for public opinion," Wang said, adding that China strongly opposes "the politicization of the pandemic."
"We were determined to make sure that the objective narrative and collective memory of the battle against the pandemic would not be distorted by lies," the minister added.
The results of several international studies suggested that when China first announced the new virus it had already been present in other countries.
A month ago, research into blood donations by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that Covid-19 had been infecting Americans several weeks before December 31, 2019.
Similar surveys carried out in France and Italy found coronavirus antibodies in blood samples from early December and September that year, respectively.
Meanwhile, tests of sewage water in Spain uncovered traces of the coronavirus in probes taken as early as March 2019 - that's nine months before the pandemic is believed to have started.
Chinese health officials earlier suggested that Covid-19 could've gotten to Wuhan from abroad on frozen seafood or meat products. They also suspected the participants of the Military World Games, which were held in the city in October 2019, of transmitting the disease
Comment: That'll be another point for Sott.net, thank you very much.
We said as much at the beginning of all this, that the Wuhan outbreak was just one cluster among many that developed (almost) simultaneously in Italy, Iran, Israel, France, the UK, and the US (that we know of - it was probably spreading elsewhere too but it just wasn't noticed and thus reported by the given country's press).
China's 'fault' is apparently that it cared enough to actually zoom in and look at what was happening, discover a coronavirus they'd never seen before, and crack its genome to see that it contained sequences from HIV and other viruses, thus realizing it was man-made.
This apparently made them freak out that 'the Americans are attacking us', so they pioneered 'lockdown' in one of its provinces (to psychologically calm its 1.5 billion people, NOT to literally 'contain the virus', which its experts would have known full well is scientifically impossible with an aerosolized coronavirus like this).
Then, many weeks later, Western countries began - in lockstep with one another, as if according to some prearranged model or plan - to 'use the Chinese model' and shutter their countries, also for political purposes and NOT to 'contain the virus' - thereby bringing civilization to a halt and ushering in totalitarian hell for many.
And with gene-editing vaccines being rolled out to compound what was already an immune system-distorting genetically modified vaccine virus, the worst is yet to come. So people had better get busy protecting themselves from the coming cytokine storm, or get busy dyin'...