‘China and Russia hand-in-hand on Virus conspiracy’,says US

China and Russia had stepped up efforts to jointly spread false narratives over the coronavirus pandemic, the US accused. The Whitehouse also went on to blame that Beijing is enacting a script written by Moscow. China had adopted an aggressive diplomatic strategy over the US and some of its staunch allies took China responsible for the catastrophic World economic break down after the dreaded Covid pandemic.

“Even before the COVID-19 crisis we assessed a certain level of coordination between Russia and the PRC in the realm of propaganda,” said Lea Gabrielle, coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which tracks foreign propaganda. She said, after the pandemic, the cooperation between communist superpowers had accelerated rapidly.“We see this convergence as a result of what we consider to be pragmatism between the two actors who want to shape public understanding of the COVID pandemic for their own purposes,” she said.

The Global Engagement Center earlier said thousands of Russian-linked social media accounts were spreading conspiracies about the pandemic, including charging that the virus first detected last year in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan was created by the United States.

China outraged the United States when a foreign ministry spokesman tweeted a conspiracy that the US military brought the virus to Wuhan, but the two countries reached an informal rhetorical truce in late March after telephone talks between President Donald Trump and his counterpart Xi Jinping. Tensions have again soared as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushes the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory, a stance that Beijing in turn calls disinformation.

The US blame is plainly rejected by WHO as it asserted that the particular strain of the virus had no characteristics of a human-engineered virus. France, a traditional US ally had also refused to line-up on the US side saying the nCov2 virus cannot be developed in a lab. France even disclosed that a Covid patient is recorded in its soil in December-when the first case was reported in China on December 26.