China looking to shift blame for COVID-19 pandemic to clear its international reputation

China is looking to shift blame for the COVID-19 outbreak after almost a year since the first case was detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Ever since Zeng Guang, an ex-epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that coronavirus originated elsewhere before it appeared in China in December 2019, the state-controlled media of the Communist State have directed all their resources in propagating the claim as fact. 

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Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian also indicated the same saying it doesn't necessarily mean that the virus originated in China, even though the country was the first in the world to report cases. Chinese scientists have also submitted a paper to science journal The Lancet, wherein they have suggested that the virus may have originated in the Indian subcontinent well before it appeared in China. The paper is awaiting peer review before it can be published. 

'Highly speculative' 

China is yet to provide any solid evidence to back its extreme claim, which western scientists say is nothing but a way to whitewash itself. China's reputation at the international stage has been tarnished after it emerged that the virus originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, which was operating illegally. People familiar with China's policies say the country is trying to change the international public opinion by shifting the blame for the outbreak on somebody else. 

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Michael Ryan, director of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization (WHO), earlier this week dubbed the reports of COVID-19 emerging somewhere else as 'highly speculative'.

Western scientists say it appears certain that the first recorded cases of COVID-19 emerged from China, where human-to-human transmission might also have taken place, thus it is most likely that the disease originated in the country itself.

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China was also the source of the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak that happened between 2002-2004 and infected more than 8,000 people from 29 different countries and killed at least 774. The latest SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in late 2019, has so far infected 62.5 million people and killed 1.46 million worldwide.

The ongoing pandemic is the deadliest in over 100 years due to the sheer number of people it has impacted, which again is one of the main concerns of China and why it wants to shift the blame as soon as possible before history registers it. 

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