On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the People’s Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) must have emerged in the capital of Hubei province that has not been held under sufficient scrutiny by Western corporate media.

The question of whether the COVID-19 coronavirus could have come from the U.S. army was controversially raised by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liljian Zhao, who tweeted an article from the Center for Research on Globalization website which subsequently went viral. Feigning concern over the spread of “disinformation”, Western media coverage uniformly avoided sourcing the article Zhao had shared on social media while predictably dismissing the claim as a “conspiracy theory.” Meanwhile, Iran’s Civil Defense Chief also said the coronavirus could be a biological attack on China and Iran, as the Islamic Republic has been the third-most impacted nation with more than 12,000 cases including many at the highest levels of its government with multiple senior officials infected. Contrary to such mainstream media scaremongering, it is completely reasonable and should be permitted to speculate about the origins of the virus. That Zhao’s posing of the theory received such a hostile response from the U.S. establishment is telling of how delicate their propaganda echo chamber is.