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Propaganda and Lies: CCP Accused the U.S. and Italy of Being the Origins of the Virus

To defuse its accountability of hiding information and its inaction which caused the worldwide outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tried to accuse other countries of creating the virus. The following are two cases:

#1: Zhao Lijian, Spokesman & Deputy Director General of the Information Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, after accusing the United States of sending soldiers to bring the epidemic to Wuhan, retweeted a tweet by an American named Beatrice (an anonymous name), as evidence that the U.S. had the virus earlier:

From Twitter: Rt: I really think COVID-19 has been here in America for awhile. Do you guys remember how sick everyone was during the holidays/early January? And how everyone was saying they had the “flu” and the flu shot “didn’t work”?

The Daily Beast interviewed Beatrice and reported that she is not a doctor, nurse, or epidemiologist. She was just a normal person wondering aloud on Twitter what was going on with this disease.

#2: Global Times, a media under the CCP mouthpiece People’s Daily, referenced an NPR report quoting Dr. Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan. The doctor said general practitioners in the country “remember having seen a very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November.” Global Times created an article stating that Italy had the virus back in November 2019. It also tweeted:

#Italy may have had an unexplained strain of pneumonia as early as November and December 2019 with highly suspected symptoms of #COVID19, reports said.

However, on March 24, il Foglio, an Italian media published a special interview with Dr. Remuzzi. Dr. Remuzzi said that Chinese media misquoted his words. He stated three times in the interview, “No doubt this virus is from China.” Guilia Pompili, the reporter who interviewed Dr. Remuzzi mentioned that Chinese news reporters had inquired of Dr. Remuzzi many times recently and each time Dr. Remuzzi clarified his position that the virus was from China. However, he had not yet seen any of the reporters reporting his clarification, which he felt quite bizzare.

Related postings on Chinascope:

1. Source: Twitter

2. Source: Daily Beast, March 25, 2020
https://www.thedailybeast.com/states-tell-coronavirus-refugees-we-cant-take-care-of-our-own?ref=scroll

3. Source: Twitter

4. Excerpt in Chinese

意大利一所知名医学机构的专家近日在接受美国媒体采访时表示，意大利可能早在去年11月和12月就已经出现了高度疑似新冠病毒肺炎症状的不明原因肺炎。

说出这话的意大利专家名叫朱塞佩·雷穆齐（Giuseppe Remuzzi），是意大利乃至全欧洲知名的马里奥·内格里（Mario Negri）药理研究所的主任。

他是在接受美国国家公共广播网（NPR）的采访中，在被问到意大利为何在2月21日疫情暴发的情况被揭开后表现得“措手不及”时，做出这一表述的。这段采访中的原话如下：

“雷穆齐说他现在听到来自医师的消息。‘他们记得见过这种奇怪的肺炎，非常严重，特别是在老年人中，在（去年）12月甚至11月时，’他说。‘这意味着在我们知道中国的疫情暴发之前，病毒至少就已经在意大利的伦巴第北部地区传播起来了。’”

Source: Global Times, March 21, 2020
https://world.huanqiu.com/article/3xVndUyXZB1

5. Excerpt in Chinese:

中共喉舌《环球时报》3月21日即发表题为“意大利知名专家：中国疫情爆发前，病毒或已在意大利传播了”的报导，中共央视则以“意大利专家：高度疑似新冠病毒（中共病毒）或于去年底已在意大利、英国出现”为题报导，其后新浪网、京报网等传媒纷纷转载或报导，令雷穆齐的言论在大陆广传。且中共驻法国大使馆亦加入宣传。这些扭曲的言论经网络水军疯传，引部分网民误认为出现病毒源于意大利的新证据。

意大利《罗马日报》（il Foglio）3月24日头版刊登记者庞皮利（Guilia Pompili）和卡彭（Luciano Capone）专访雷穆齐的文章，题为“病毒文宣”，文中雷穆齐指中共官媒“断章取义”，三次强调病毒来自中国，“毫无疑问，这病毒是中国的”。

众新闻报导，雷穆齐这次接受《罗马日报》专访，特别强调中共官媒报导利用他散播“武汉肺炎（中共肺炎）病毒源自意大利”的讯息，可视为“一种声明或影射，彻头彻尾是对内和对外的政治宣传”，他再重申根据基因研究，毫无疑问，病毒来自中国。

访问雷穆齐的意大利记者庞皮利向众新闻透露，中国大陆记者多次向雷穆齐查询，雷穆齐亦多次重申自己的立场，指病毒源自中国，但未见中国记者报导他的澄清，雷穆齐感到相当“诧异。”

Source: Epoch Times, March 26, 2020
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/3/26/n11976113.htm

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