Coronavirus: China fakes Swiss expert for Wuhan laboratory leak propaganda

Chinese media quote Swiss biologist claiming the US pressured WHO over its virus source probe. But the expert doesn’t exist.

Security personnel outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Picture: AFP.

Chinese state media has 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 America had pressured the WHO to investigate the theory that the coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan.

References to Edwards were removed from online media sites yesterday (Wednesday) after the Swiss embassy said that there was no Swiss citizen of that name and that it could find no academic articles by a biologist on that subject.

“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 to which Chinese state media are willing to go to trumpet the official line that the US is politicising the search for the origin of the virus, which many suspect was a leak from a Chinese laboratory in the central city of Wuhan, where the first Covid-19 cases were reported in December 2019.

A Wuhan company’s staff queues for a Covid-19 test. Picture: AFP.

A Facebook page in Edwards’s name was set up on July 24 that suggested he was from Berne, the Swiss capital, and featured a profile picture of the Radcliffe Camera 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, the party mouthpiece, 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 expert was said to have told the People’s Daily. He expressed “the disappointment of the international scientific community toward the US”.

The streets of Wuhan are quiet as the virus returns. Picture: Getty Images.

After the embassy’s statement the Facebook account in Edwards’s name was deleted.

The animosity between China and America has intensified in recent months, with the latter alleging that the lab leak scenario is likely. China has rejected plans by the WHO to send a second team of experts to the country to investigate whether the virus might have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was studying coronaviruses in animals.

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

It is not the first time that the Communist Party has been accused of using fake social media profiles to spread disinformation. In 2019 Twitter and Facebook suspended hundreds of accounts that they said originated in China and were spreading smears about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, the results of which were published in May, found that an army of fake accounts was retweeting Chinese diplomats and state media on Twitter to amplify the government’s positions. President Xi has put a new emphasis on overseas propaganda, urging state media to tell the Chinese story well and make China “credible, loveable and respectable” in the world.

The Times