Western media outlets are spreading COVID-19 conspiracies centering on China: scholar

BEIJING -- Western media outlets have been spreading COVID-19 conspiracies centering on China, Keith Lamb, a scholar on China's international relations, has said.

"This stark difference, between reality and reporting, has always made me skeptical of Western reporting on COVID-19, fed by various political actors, who have dogmatically attempted to pin the blame for COVID-19 on China," Lamb wrote in an opinion article published Monday on China Global Television Network.

Lamb said through his personal experiences in China in the early days of the outbreak, he has felt the country's "unity of action, swift organization and overall goodwill," which was in great contrast to the Western China-smearing rhetoric.

Besides, hard science has also proven that those Western reports rushing to tie China to COVID-19 origin were merely smears, he said, citing a study co-conducted by the VisMederi laboratory at the University of Siena and the National Cancer Institute in Milan as an example.

The study published in November 2020 showed that 11.6 percent of the 959 healthy volunteers in Italy who participated in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed COVID-19 antibodies well before February 2020 when the first official case was recorded in the country, with four cases from the study dating to the first week of October 2019, which means those people had been infected in September 2019.

It indicated that the virus could have circulated in Italy weeks before it was formally identified in China.

A retest of the blood samples from the study, the results of which were detailed in a paper published on July 14, also found that the oldest sample with coronavirus-linked antibody IgM dated back to Sept. 3, 2019, from Italy's northeastern region of Veneto.

However, Lamb noted, it was only until now that Western media outlets began to report on the research.

"Why is this information only coming out in the Western press now? It's not because the research has only just been released ... The truth is, this news did not fit the anti-China narrative disseminated by the corporate media, and deep state interests, who desperately refuse to report China in a positive light," Lamb said.