China’s
Global Times, a newspaper published by the government, dismissed Thursday the widely accepted consensus that the Chinese coronavirus originated in Hubei province, China, as a “conspiracy theory” that did not deserve free speech safeguards.
The first cases of Chinese coronavirus infections in human beings were documented in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, in late 2019. No evidence exists suggesting that any cases of human infection were documented before November 17, 2019, the date leaked Chinese government documents reportedly listed as that in which doctors confirmed the first Wuhan case.
Beijing has publicly only accepted that cases existed within its borders as of December of that year, arguing that evidence of cases in places like Italy, which has a high concentration of Chinese immigrants, before December suggest a foreign origin for the novel coronavirus. The Chinese Communist Party has also increasingly pressured the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) to launch an investigation into the United States as the origin nation of the virus, despite no evidence suggesting that the first infections occurred there.