Going viral: How a book on Amazon inspired the latest COVID conspiracy

It is easy to forget that Chinese researchers from Wuhan discovered the origins of the 2002 SARS outbreak. In a remote cave in the south-western province of Yunnan, virologists identified a colony of horseshoe bats with virus strains that jumped to humans and went on to kill hundreds of people around the world. They made their discovery in 2017 – almost 15 years after the first SARS outbreak.

Around the same time as the researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were searching for the bats, another group of Chinese researchers were working on a far less credible theory – that SARS had been weaponised by foreign countries and introduced to China. The claim was published in a 2015 book, The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, written by scientists from a military university and civilian researchers.

The conspiracy theory attracted little attention and was discredited by the legitimate scientific community in China. But the book, available online for $9.99, continued to make its way around fringe websites and bookstores.

When COVID-19 hit and Wuhan was identified as the epicentre of a new pandemic, everything changed. The book’s price surged tenfold as scarce physical copies were swept up by online conspiracy communities who seized upon its bogus central claim about the origin of SARS. They claimed it was evidence that China was trying to turn the tables on its enemies in the murky field of bio-warfare.

A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after the WHO team arrived in February. Credit: AP

Indeed, the book is now one of the key references for what is the Wuhan lab bio-warfare theory, which posits that after foreign powers manufactured SARS and introduced it to China in 2002, Beijing developed the technology as a bio-weapon that was either accidentally or deliberately released in 2019, infecting 159 million people and killing 3.3 million worldwide so far.

Ever since the novel coronavirus broke containment lines in China, a propaganda war has raged about its origins. Media networks, in China and closer to home, have sometimes been co-opted into these campaigns. Beijing has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the virus may have come from frozen food imported into China and called for inspectors to be sent into the United States and Europe to investigate claims COVID-19 originated there.

A joint China-World Health Organisation investigation, hampered by Beijing’s lack of transparency, said in February it was most likely to have been transmitted through an intermediate animal host and may have been spread through frozen wild animals in the Wuhan market. The Trump administration, on the other hand, enthusiastically promoted the theory that the virus leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology: regarded as the least likely scenario of those examined by WHO’s medical experts.

The stakes are high: substantial evidence of a Wuhan lab leak would damage China’s international standing and its pursuit of global influence.

As far back as last April 2020, the Australian intelligence community was concerned that the Trump administration was vulnerable to circular intelligence, which is when a government tip triggers a story that ends up being referenced in an intelligence briefing. This concern was heightened when News Corp Australia tabloid The Daily Telegraph ran a lengthy front-page story on May 4 2020 about a 15-page dossier that laid “the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China”.

The Telegraph story alleged that China destroyed evidence at Wuhan research facilities and was soon being quoted in the US by national security experts on Fox News. It was followed up by Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro who said China “spawned” the virus. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo then claimed there was “enormous evidence” of a Wuhan lab leak.

The document was, in fact, a “non-paper” compiled by the US State Department which contained no classified information, referenced news reports and was merely a timeline of events, according to multiple senior Australian government sources who have read the document.

It could not have come at a worse time; Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne had called weeks before for an independent investigation into the coronavirus and the headlines made it seem as if Canberra had aligned with the Trump administration to push the Wuhan lab theory at the expense of other lines of inquiry.

Last Saturday, another document “obtained by the US State Department” landed on the front page of The Australian. “Chinese military scientists discussed weaponising SARS coronaviruses,” the headline read.

News Corp investigative reporter Sharri Markson wrote the stories in the Telegraph and The Australian. She is also writing a book investigating the evidence for a laboratory leak that will be published by Murdoch-owned HarperCollins this year. The “paper” Markson describes in her article in The Australian is in fact the book that came out in 2015, Unnatural Origin of SARS. The article said the book was evidence that senior Chinese scientists were training the military in biological warfare five years before the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons, written by scientists from a military university and civilian researchers (2015).

“This is a war mentality, teaching Chinese students the best conditions under which to release a bio-weapon,” Markson said on her Sky News show the following day. “This is very dangerous stuff.”

Within hours, some Australian MPs jumped on Markson’s report as evidence of China’s intentions. Senator Matt Canavan, a former Coalition frontbencher, said The Australian had “done an amazing job uncovering documents that show Chinese plans for biological warfare”.

Appearing on Markson’s Sky News show on Sunday night, James Paterson, the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, said the “paper” showed that biological weapons are “of a great deal of interest to the highest levels of the People’s Liberation Army”. But Paterson did not entirely embrace the book’s premise, cautioning that the environment was ripe for disinformation. He said until China allowed an independent investigation, conspiracy theories would flourish.

The article in The Australian reported the US State Department obtained the document in May, 2020, as it conducted an investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Robert Potter, the Canberra internet security analyst who verified the authenticity of the document in Markson’s story, said he told The Australian that the book was available on Amazon, Twitter and WeChat. “It had been covered by some pretty right-wing people, [including] some of the Miles Guo crowd,” he said, referring to the exiled Chinese billionaire who has partnered with Steve Bannon in an attempt to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

“And that was all part of my findings,” he said. “It's pretty much what's on the can. It is a conspiracy theory document written by some people who have some affiliation with the Chinese government.”

‘The theory is ridiculous. It is like saying I can divine US military secrets by reading some random book from Amazon.’

Adam Ni, China Policy Centre

Markson said she never claimed the book was secret, pointing out that she reported it had been circulating among dissidents since Pompeo made a passing reference to it in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in February this year. She said it provided an insight into how 18 senior military scientists affiliated with a defence university were thinking about weaponising coronaviruses.

“Highly respected China analyst Luke de Pulford said this document raised very serious questions that need urgent answers about how Chinese scientists at military academies are thinking about bio-weapons,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. “Feel free to contact him.”

Asked for his views on the importance of the book, de Pulford, the co-ordinator of the International Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group of up to 200 MPs concerned about China’s rising power, was equivocal.

“I make no claims about the significance of the paper – that’s a question for the China analysts, and there are at least two schools of thought on it,” he said. “What’s beyond doubt is the paper’s provenance. It’s legitimate and poses questions which deserve thorough probing.”

New Corp’s Fox News followed up on Markson’s story on Sunday, questioning US Republican Homeland Security Committee member Ron Johnson on whether the article showed China was preparing biological weapons for World War III.

“Does that shock anybody? It certainly doesn’t shock me,” said Johnson.

Steve Bannon, former Trump adviser and founder of the right-wing Breitbart news network, hosted Markson on his podcast to discuss the Wuhan lab theory. Credit: AP

Markson then was a guest on Tuesday on the War Room podcast hosted by Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and chair of far-right media network Breitbart. She told him it was “absurd” that the Wuhan lab theory was being treated as a conspiracy and claimed it had been marked as a cold case by Western intelligence agencies.

“It has taken such a long time, you know, and it really wasn’t until Trump left office for people even to begin to comprehend that this might not have a natural origin,” she said.

Out of office, some individuals close to Trump, including Pompeo, have publicly linked COVID-19 to China’s bio-weapons program and promoted the importance of the 2015 book.

American intelligence services are still probing the Wuhan lab leak theory and the Australian government also has not ruled it out. Some officials within both governments, who were not authorised to speak publicly, put the probability of a leak as high as 40 per cent, while they consider the possibility that it jumped directly from an animal host in nature to humans at 60 per cent. But there is no line of inquiry suggesting it was deliberately leaked.

The episode highlights the complexity of researching the shady world of China’s military researchers. As Markson points out, the lead author of the book, Xu Dezhong, is “not a fringe player”. He held a senior position at the Air Force Medical University and reported to the Chinese Military Commission and Ministry of Health during the SARS epidemic in 2003.

But hypotheses published by military university researchers do not automatically translate into government policies.

Conspiracy theories are regularly published in China, including by those connected with the government. In the 2000s, Chinese government-funded researchers claimed climate change science was a conspiracy by developed nations. In 2007, a best-selling book in China argued that the US had deliberately engineered the Asian financial crisis. Sometimes these conspiracy theories occur organically online, just like in other countries, and sometimes they are supported by a government-led disinformation push or a surge in nationalistic publishing.

“Chinese military personnel publish all kinds of books of varying quality,” said the China Policy Centre’s Adam Ni. “Some Chinese military officers advocate sinking a US aircraft carrier, for example, or invading Taiwan. It doesn’t mean it’s official policy.”

China is not the only nation studying bio-warfare, which includes developing viruses or bacteria as a means to kill or incapacitate humans. Western intelligence agencies regularly do their own work in this area. The US Army’s director of intelligence, Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, this year told a congressional committee that China “probably” has the technical expertise to weaponise chemical and biological agents.

Swinburne emeritus professor and China expert John Fitzgerald said the theory that COVID-19 was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan laboratory could not be ruled out, but this should not be conflated with bio-warfare.

“The government of China hasn't helped by inhibiting any serious inquiry by the WHO or its own scientists into the laboratory origins theory,” Fitzgerald said. “But conspiracy theories don’t help either. The original source [the 2015 book] appears to claim the US military was responsible for the SARS outbreak. The second conspiracy drawing on that is the Chinese military is responsible for the current COVID outbreak.”

Fitzgerald, a critic of China’s foreign interference activities in Australia, said he is concerned that media coverage of the book feeds into Chinese Communist Party propaganda about the western media, adding it does a “great disservice to anyone who wants to get to the bottom of COVID-19”.

“Chinese media want to criticise Australia and its China policies as groundless and irrational,” he said. “And this is fodder supporting their case.”

Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute, said it is important to debate the origins of COVID-19, considering the lack of transparency from the Chinese government, but “it isn’t clear that the book advances anything on that score”.

“It is not secret, and has been up on the internet for at least five years, which tells you immediately that it doesn’t contain hypersensitive information as far as Beijing is concerned,” he said.

Researcher Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, whose work has exposed human rights crackdowns in Xinjiang, said there was no evidence that the book ever had any official backing. “The book has been poorly reviewed in China, ridiculed, and its theories debunked by Chinese scientists,” Xu said on Twitter.

The six-year-old conspiracy theory, given front-page treatment in a vacuum of official independent investigation, is now being weaponised on both sides of the Pacific.

China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday night latched onto The Australian’s reporting of the 2015 book to argue that it was the US that was researching bio-weapons.

“The argument [shows] that it is the US that is researching the technology of genetic engineering applied to bio-warfare and bio-terrorism,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

Ni said the coverage adds to an atmosphere of anxiety as China-Australia relations fall to their lowest level in decades.

“Our debate should be evidence-driven and not by pure falsehood,” he said. “The theory is ridiculous. It is like saying I can divine US military secrets by reading some random book from Amazon.”

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