Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic by China

The Chinese government has launched a disinformation campaign to play down its failure to contain the early outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Hubei, lack of coordination between its central and provincial disease control as the disease spread across mainland China, and the subsequent worldwide epidemic.
Origin disinformation
Multiple origin locations
The Chinese government has made repeated claims that COVID-19 did not originate just in Wuhan, but across multiple locations around the world, from Autumn of 2019.
In March of 2020, The Washington Post reviewed Chinese state media as well as posts in social media and discovered that the anti-American conspiracy theories that were circulating among Chinese users had "gained steam through a mix of unexplained official statements magnified by social media, censorship and doubts stoked by state media and government officials"
In March of 2020, Chinese state media propagated the theory that the spread of the virus may have started in Italy before the Wuhan outbreak, pointing to an interview Italian doctor Giuseppe Remuzzi gave to National Public Radio, wherein he mentioned reports of unusual pneumonia cases dating back to November and December of 2019. Remuzzi later said that his words were "twisted".
In November of 2020, Chinese state media propagated a misleading account of statements by World Health Organization's top emergency director Michael Ryan, speculating that the virus could have originated outside of China. In an interview with Reuters on November 27 2020, Ryan said "It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged" and repeated that the WHO would seek to send an investigative team to China to probe the origins of the virus.
In December of 2020, Chinese state media misconstrued research from Alexander Kekulé, the director of the Institute for Biosecurity Research in Halle, suggesting it was Italy, not China, where the virus began. In media published by Xinhua News Agency, China Daily, and television programs such CGTN, excerpts from an interview Kekulé gave gave to ZDF were quoted, purporting that 99.5 percent of the coronavirus spreading around the world at the time was from variant originating in northern Italy. In follow on interviews, Kekule said his words were twisted, calling the Chinese media's reports "pure propaganda".
In December 2020, the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper featured a study by scientists associated with the state-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences positing that the earliest human-to-human transmission occurred on the Indian subcontinent three to four months before the Wuhan outbreak. The study, which was not peer-reviewed, was posted on the preprint platform SSRN. It was later withdrawn from the platform at the authors' request.
Food chain transmission origins
The Chinese government is claiming that COVID-19 may have first been transmitted to Wuhan from abroad, via frozen food imports.
US Army and Fort Detrick origins
On 12 March 2020, two spokesmen for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian and Geng Shuang, alleged at a press conference that Western powers may have "bio-engineered" the coronovirus, alluding to the US Government, but more specifically to the US Army as having created and spread the virus.
In January 2021, Hua Chunying renewed the conspiracy theory from Lijian and Shuang that the SARS-COV-2 virus originating in the United States at the U.S. biological weapons lab Fort Detrick. This conspiracy theory quickly went trending on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, and Chunying continued to cite evidence on Twitter, while asking the government of the United States to open up Fort Detrick for further investigation to determine if it is the source of the SARS-COV-2 virus.
Treatment disinformation
Chinese traditional medicine
In June 2020, the Chinese government published a white paper, claiming over 92% of COVID-19 cases in China were treated with traditional Chinese medicine.
International response
On March 25, 2020, the "intentional disinformation campaign" by China was discussed among the Group of Seven.

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