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China Medicine

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Now Spreading Conspiracy Theory that Moderna Created Covid 177

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs now spreading the conspiracy theory that Moderna created Covid. New York Times reporter Paul Mozur: Hard to believe they don't see the credibility they lose amplifying this stuff. Takeaway is still no sign the wolf warrior approach has been reconsidered. [...] It underscores how the CAC quashes rumors it doesn't like, but let's those of political expediency flourish within China.
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China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Now Spreading Conspiracy Theory that Moderna Created Covid

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  • by tekram ( 8023518 ) on Friday March 25, 2022 @12:28PM (#62389291)
    .. of the people. As shown in the 2016 US election and subsequent events, the spread of conspiracy theories is not about convincing the 100% or 50%, it is just about convincing the 10 to15% and that is enough to change the course of history.
    • Mod parent up.

      Something I myself forget, those promulgating this kind of propaganda are not emotionally invested in truth or in my reaction or my persuausion. They are focused on their own end goals, and the population these days is primed for susceptibility.

    • by tsqr ( 808554 )

      11% of Americans either "strongly" or "somewhat " believe that the moon landings were faked. [statista.com] And this post will probably be replied to by some of them.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, count in anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, and those that believe in "an invisible man in the sky" and you get a measure of how bad the problem with irrationality really is.

    • by jd ( 1658 )

      80% believe in angels, 90% supported Bush's WMD claims, 74% use Windows. A 10% level shouldn't be hard to achieve.

    • I don't think conspiracy theories really change the course of history. Maybe it changes the actors but the basic plot remains the same. There was already latent racism and communism in Germany and other European countries when Hitler rose to power on the back of his claims of a Jewish-communist conspiracy.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      .. of the people. As shown in the 2016 US election and subsequent events, the spread of conspiracy theories is not about convincing the 100% or 50%, it is just about convincing the 10 to15% and that is enough to change the course of history.

      Indeed. The appalling fact is that you can only reach about 20% of all people with rational argument. Hence just shifting 10% or 15% of the mindless masses can give you a decisive victory. Democracy is unfortunately broken and can be exploited because the overwhelming majority of the human population is not rational.

  • It is about local credibility.

    If you haven't been there it is hard to understand the culture. I have been there twice and was inundated with pro-China propaganda. For example on their high speed trains. The trains are literally a blatant copy of the trains in Germany. It is clear that they stole the designs. However, when you are on that train they have a video play over and over that says that the train was independently developed, designed and manufactured by glorious China.

    • It is about local credibility.

      Uh, then why was this message not broadcast by The Leader himself directly to and internally to China, and instead broadcast via a message from the office of foreign affairs?

      We've screwed with a lot of definitions in recent times, but I'm pretty sure foreign still means what I think it means. Not doubting your claim one bit regarding the trains, but the method of delivery here, speaks to the world, not merely to China.

    • Do the Chinese people seem to believe the propaganda, or do they seem to know that their government lies all the time?
  • they are saying moderna PATENTED covid in 2016. That should be pretty easy to fact check...
  • I look forward to this new era of official government fiction. Perhaps the US and China will even have a number to which you can text your vote for which of their narratives is more truthy.

  • Communist
    Censorship
    Propaganda /s

  • They should have used "allegedly". I noticed a trend in US media, they use this word in the title for everything unconfirmed.

  • In our zeal to bash China (yeah I know, who can pass up a good opportunity) you spread the very fake news you criticize. Here is the original source, very hard to Google:
    https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/03... [dailyexpose.uk]
    https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/03... [dailyexpose.uk]
    These guys are good! lots of scientific notations and supporting evidence down to searching the BLAST database.
    Fake news has upped their game!
    • That's not the original source. The original source was a scientific paper (linked to in the summary). The article you linked is just a distortion of the original paper, trying to say things not supported by the evidence.

      • That's not the original source. The original source was a scientific paper (linked to in the summary). The article you linked is just a distortion of the original paper, trying to say things not supported by the evidence.

        Sorry, but I don't see the link to the paper in the summary. Is it in the Twitter link perhaps? Or maybe the summary was rewritten?

        • Yeah I didn't drink coffee today. Here is the paper [frontiersin.org].

          • Thanks. It seems this is the point of contention (hopefully correctly reformatted):

            The correlation between this SARS-CoV-2 sequence and the reverse complement of a proprietary mRNA sequence is of uncertain origin. Conventional biostatistical analysis indicates that the probability of this sequence randomly being present in a 30,000-nucleotide viral genome is 3.21 ×10^-11.

            This claim is recapitulated in a less technical form at the end of the paper:

            The presence in SARS-CoV-2 of a 19-nucleotide RNA sequence encoding an FCS at amino acid 681 of its spike protein with 100% identity to the reverse complement of a proprietary MSH3 mRNA sequence is highly unusual. Potential explanations for this correlation should be further investigated.

            However, a pseudonymous comment below the article gives a non-technical explanation for the anomaly. Basically, both the virus and the vaccine maker are/were targeting, in a manner of speaking, the same parts of the human genome. Another reader gives a more detailed explanation that sadly got eaten by site's comment formatting system.

            • Yeah, this is the furin cleavage site.

              If someone doing research on coronaviruses wanted to add furin cleavege site in order to make it easier for the virus to fuse with a cell going through the cell wall (that's my understanding), then they might do a search through the database to find this RNA sequence and insert it into the coronavirus genome. Alternately, they might have already been familiar with it (since some AIDS research has focused on it).

              Alternately, it might have evolved naturally. However, ther

  • Okay, who was so asleep at the wheel they didn't see this BS coming?

    Pure Alinsky tactic.

  • Must they also steal our conspiracy theories?

    Years ago at lunch we would play this game, "Conspiracy theory of the day..." in which the goal was to take two unrelated headlines and invent a conspiracy to link them together. The player with the most plausible explanation won.

    Had I known then that this game would soon become the de facto sport of the ruling class, I suppose I would have kept my mouth shut.

  • Today everything is "flood the zone with shit". Liars used to be shamed, now they get clicks and interviews.

  • the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the virus got it's start in the wet markets due to a combination of slash and burn forestry practices and wild animals in close proximity resulting in lots of opportunities for the virus to mutate and jump from animals to humans.

    If you dig into it you'll find decades of epidemiologists warning us this was going to happen. It's why when Obama handed off the presidency to Trump and it was time to do a "disaster drill" the disaster they used was "a pandemic".
    • the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the virus got it's start in the wet markets

      It's easy to have a consensus when those exposing contrary evidence can't get published [dailymail.co.uk] and those connected to the accused pretend not to be so to discredit accusers. [archive.is]

      • So one paper couldn't get published in major journals and that's somehow evidence of systematic cover-up of anything related to a lab leak theory? Or maybe, just maybe could it be they just weren't convincing with their arguments?

        A quick search on PubMed shows tons of articles discussing the lab leak possibilities, so clearly if there is a systematic campaign to block scientists from talking about this possibility, they are doing a very bad job at it.
    • by skam240 ( 789197 )

      China needs the wet markets and they need to slash and burn those forests.

      I don't understand your claim that China needs those. Particularly in the case of wet markets, there's no reason why they couldnt open more grocery stores. A lot of their wet markets have already moved indoors anyways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .

  • Moderna patented a sequence of 19 nucleotides from human DNA and now it is found in Sar-covid. China claims that Sar-covid is from Moderna (which makes ones wonder why it was found in bats then )

    The weird part on this is that this sequence was in the wild already, whereas the sequence that others claim was found in Sar-covid proving china's complicity, was NEVER in the wild. IOW, there is more logic in the supposed non-wild sequence, than the wild one

    Personally, I have argued that finding a single sma
    • by jd ( 1658 )

      I think the Trump theory is more believable.

    • Might as well argue that Trump is Hitler re-incarnated.

      Highly improbable. Trump was bourne in 1946. Hitler died in 1945. A gap of little over a year. It would take quite a few turns of the wheel of rebirth to work off a karma as bad as Hitler's and still end up a Trump.

  • Everyone knows that the virus was created by a Putin-sponsored team in a Grupo Modelo laboratory. That is why it is called the Corona virus.

  • Back in the early days of the pandemic, the prevailing PRC official response to how Covid came about was all about bats in a food market. For some reason, that didn't seem to convince people... so around the same timeframe, a conspiracy theory started floating around which was very quickly quashed by Chinese officials: that whole thing about a local Chinese scientist apparently saying (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Oh, crap! I recognize this virus! Didn't this come from our lab?!?"

    Think what you will about t

  • Don't forget Twitter has an official policy [twitter.com] of disallowing COVID misinformation. Particularly applicable, "False claims about COVID-19 that invoke a deliberate conspiracy by malicious and/or powerful forces." The fact they allow such CCP posts to remain up and with no disclaimer must mean that Twitter as a company affirms their validity - or what else should we infer?

  • Something like this happens.

  • Pretty much any news out of China is bullshit. From their fake Chinese Dalai Lama to telling villagers to eat more apples to cure their heavy metal poisoning from factories.
  • It smells like FUD to me...

Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.

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