- An article from the regional daily Le Parisien which dates from May 2013 and which talks about a virus created in a Chinese laboratory was photographed and widely relayed on social networks by concerned internet users.
- The article does exist and it is available online, but the virus he talks about has nothing to do with Covid-19, as the newspaper itself explains in a new article published this Sunday.
- Despite the denials, rumors about the creation of the Covid-19 in the laboratory and its more or less voluntary distribution continue to circulate.
Since this weekend, the publication has been spreading doubt and anxiety among internet users. Because the title of the article she is following is rather alarming in this period of coronavirus pandemic: "A disturbing virus created in China". This page of the regional daily Le Parisien taken in photo is not recent, since we can see the date of May 5, 2013, but it has resurfaced since this Friday. The article's subtitle says that "Chinese researchers have made a very dangerous hybrid bird flu virus" and that "scientists are sounding the alarm."
Source: Le Parisien 2013 😡😡😡 pic.twitter.com/lxOIG3mUzm
- Missile Patriote (@deboutcroises) April 13, 2020Illustrated by the drawing of a virus that reminds of that of Covid-19 with its spikes (but which is actually a model of H1N1), the article went viral in a few hours on social networks, and gave rise to multiple speculations with conspiratorial overtones. Most internet users have established a direct link between the content of the publication and the coronavirus epidemic: “It's really real. You can go check it out. Le Parisien from May 2013. Talk about coronavirus ”,“ Do we continue, do we persist, do we go all the way taking us for idiots !!! In 2012 Bernard Cazeneuve inaugurated the P4 laboratory [class 4 pathogen, that is to say capable of harboring very pathogenic microorganisms] in Huwan [Wuhan] "," I never believed the story bats, pangolins and the Wuhan fish market. They never found the famous patient zero. It would not be surprising that the Chinese lie to us ”,“ AIDS, corona, it's all created in the laboratory, it's obvious. "
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What does this article say, which does exist and is still online on the Parisian website? "The world scientific community has been in a stir since the announcement on Friday [May 3, 2013] in the American journal Science of the creation of a dangerous hybrid virus by Chinese biologists, mixing H5N1 and H1N1 genes. "Further:" A handling error, a leak, a bad intention and a GMO virus of this kind can easily "contaminate people, cause between 100,000 and 100 million deaths", estimates Simon Wain Hobson, of the Institut Pasteur . "Or:" The laboratories I saw there are brand new. China is not known to harbor terrorists and the authorities are very sensitive to biosecurity and biosecurity, "reassures Jean-Claude Manuguerra, virologist at the Institut Pasteur. "
The discovery of this experience in 2013 was the subject of a dispatch from the France press agency and was repeated in other media, such as in L'Obs on May 3, which is less reassuring than the article. du Parisien at the time of quoting him also Simon Wain-Hobson, who recalls "how the leak of a strain of foot-and-mouth disease, a viral disease which fortunately only affects cattle, caused an epizootic in Great Britain in 2007."
"As different as an earthworm is from a human"
Given the extent of the rumor, Le Parisien himself insisted on recontextualizing this article and alerted readers to its site in a new article devoted to the subject this Sunday: "This information, which is true, however requires updating precise context, so as not to link it to the new coronavirus that appeared in China at the end of 2019. "And to quote the American biologist Richard H. Ebright, laboratory director in New Jersey (United States), who" was one of the critical scientists of this study on the hybrid virus ", recontacted by the regional daily:" There is no link between the hybrid virus H5N1-H1N1 and SARS-CoV-2 [the scientific name of the new coronavirus]. These two viruses are of different phyla (phylum). They are as different as an earthworm is from humans. "
In addition, the laboratory referred to in 2013 is not located in Wuhan, the epicenter city of the Covid-19 pandemic, as Internet users suggest. Still on this article, Le Parisien recalls that the study of the time “was carried out by a team of Chinese researchers from the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, under the tutelage of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, northeast of China (more than 2,200 km from Wuhan). It is only since 2017 that the Wuhan Virology Institute has had a very high security laboratory called "P4".
An April 7 article from our "Fake Off" section in which scientists explained that the Covid-19 could not be a laboratory construction already denied this kind of rumor. Earlier, on January 31, 20 Minutes had also interviewed the journalist for Challenges , Antoine Izambard, author of the book France-China: Dangerous connections to Stock editions (and who was able to visit the laboratory at the time of his investigation ), which stated that "the theories circulating on the emergence of the coronavirus in the P4 laboratory in Wuhan are conspiracies. I am not saying it is impossible, but there are no concrete elements at this stage that would go in this direction. "
But despite the last details of the Parisian and all these denials, theories of this type regularly reappear and propagate the idea of a virus which would have left - voluntarily or not - his laboratory.
The conspiracy theory of a handling error in a Wuhan lab is increasingly becoming an assumption taken seriously in the US. The WashPost reveals a diplo cable alerting 2 years ago about the risks of this laboratory studying bat coronaviruses.https: //t.co/N5bl4iB687
- Vincent Glad (@vincentglad) April 14, 2020Some internet users remain worried and skeptical: “As a result, we know that it is possible to modify one or more viruses, which was supposedly not possible as it was claimed a few weeks ago according to some scientists… "," China should not be loaded too much ... We need what is made there so badly. "
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