Chinese media reported that the new crown virus is the party involved in the manufacture of US companies: no conclusions have been drawn

An article titled "Breakthrough: British Media Claims Research Confirms New Corona Virus Was Made by an American Company" has recently been swiped on Chinese state media and social media. However, after reviewing the original data, our reporter found that this self-media article was full of loopholes and taken out of context, and the foreign media news it quoted was also identified as false information by many fact-checking agencies.

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The WeChat public account article signed "Wen Tao" claimed that the British "Daily Mail" (Daily Mail) reported that a virus research team found that the gene of the new coronavirus contains the American biotechnology company Moderna (Moderna) in the gene. The patent gene fragment applied for in 2016, and the probability of this gene sequence randomly appearing in the new coronavirus through natural evolution is about one in three trillion. The author of the article immediately concluded: "Modena made the new crown virus, simply put, the United States made the new crown virus."

Soon, this article was reprinted by China's "Global Times", "China Daily" and other major Chinese official media. The Weibo keyword #researchconfirmscoronavirus is made by an American company# topped the trending search list on Thursday.

Article by Zhang Guan and Li Dai

However, this reporter noticed that there are many flaws in this article. First, the Daily Mail's report on Wednesday did not draw any conclusions about Modena's connection to the origin of the new coronavirus. On the contrary, the report quoted several scientists as saying that the above findings are likely to be purely coincidental, because the matching gene segments are too short.

Ren Ruihong, a former executive of the Chinese Red Cross Foundation's Serious Illness Relief Project who first noticed this article on social media, said that such a conclusion is simply ridiculous.

"This is a very sensational article, it is very imprecise. It is very difficult for him to conclude from the superposition of two short clips that the new coronavirus is made by this company. In the medical world, it takes a lot of time to prove this. argument."

Equally important, the article that went viral on the Internet was not a reference to the Daily Mail, but an English-language website called The Exposé.

Seven scholars from around the world published a "Perspective" article in the academic journal Frontiers in Virology last month, pointing out that they have At the cleavage site, a genetic match for the spike protein was found, but the article did not mention Modena, only the relevant patent number that the company applied for a few years ago. Whistleblower claims that this shows that the new coronavirus was created by Modena.

The site's synopsis mentions that Whistleblower was founded by "a very ordinary, hard-working group of people" who were tired of the "panic, lies and propaganda" of the mainstream media. But fact-checking projects by AFP, Health Feedback and other media outlets revealed that Whistleblower had previously published a large amount of incomplete or false information on health information.

The site said in January that they had been blocked by the US online payment company Paypal and could no longer use the platform to conduct transactions because they opposed the "mandatory vaccination order" for the new crown vaccine.

Reporters sent a letter to the "Disclosure" website on Friday asking for their response to the criticism, but as of press time, no response has been received.

Chen Yongmiao, a Chinese constitutional scholar, said that Chinese propaganda machines often take advantage of the language barriers of the Chinese to manipulate public opinion in order to achieve political brainwashing.

"Chinese state media often use some Chinese people who don't understand English, or who don't have channels to go to the Internet and the Internet, and cheat in the translation process. Of course, they have their own political goals."

The professor: no conclusion

It is worth noting that PolitiFact, a fact-checking agency under the Poynter Institute, an American media education institution, contacted Bala Ambati, the first author of the above academic article and a research professor at the University of Oregon. He made it clear that they understood at the outset that the genetic match might just be a coincidence, and emphasized it in the text. Ambati also said that they did not use the article to slander any individual, business or country.

The "Evidence Verification" platform, which fact-checks Chinese international news, also posted a few days ago that the existence of a gene sequence in Modena that has the same sequence as the new coronavirus does not prove that the virus came from a laboratory. Considering that this sequence can also be found in other organisms, it may also have arisen naturally.

Asked about the report, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said on a Fox Business show last month that their scientists were studying genetic data to see if that claim was accurate. . He said that it is indeed possible that the new coronavirus leaked from a laboratory, but the academic community needs to analyze it before making a judgment.

Ren Ruihong, a medical personage, said that China's local new crown epidemic is becoming more and more serious, and its media is obviously trying to confuse the public by "throwing the blame".

"Because the domestic epidemic is more serious now, after all, some people will resent that such strict control will lead to inconvenience in life. For the Chinese government, it is good to transfer the conflict to the United States at this time, at least it can release some pressure."

Nearly 5,000 new confirmed cases of new coronary pneumonia and asymptomatic infections were reported in mainland China on Thursday, according to China's National Health Commission. Jilin and Shanghai are the hardest hit areas in this round of the epidemic.