Chinese social media users are speculating that the United States could be the source of the monkeypox infectionswhich has already been detected in at least a dozen countries, including the UK, Spain and Australia.
(Also read: Monkeypox: how contagious is the disease?)
The viral infection has been trending on the popular social networking site Weibo for the past three days, and a “hashtag” about the US reporting two suspected cases of monkeypox drew more than 51 million views as of Monday. While Chinese state media have refrained from accusing the US of intentionally spreading monkeypox -accusation he made about covid-19-, many users of social networks have not been contained.
A 2021 report on biosafety preparedness planning submitted by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a US non-governmental organization, which included a monkeypox pandemic scenario, was taken out of context to suggest the US government knew the outbreak was coming.
Nationalist “influencer” Shu Chang, who has 6.41 million followers on Weibo, deliberately misrepresented the report, posting that it showed “a US plan to leak bioengineered monkeypox virus.”
The post received more than 7,500 “likes” and over 660 comments, many of which agreed with her. One noted that the US was “evil beyond mankind’s imagination.”
Posts promoting this conspiracy theory have received tens of thousands of likes on Weibo. The rare and life-threatening cousin of the smallpox virus is traditionally confined to parts of Africa, but health authorities are concerned about its recent wide spread in Europe, North America and elsewhere.
(You may be interested in: Monkey pox: these are the countries that have reported cases)
No cases have been detected in China. Health misinformation has been rampant in China and the US during the covid pandemic. Both countries had been locked in a dispute over the origins of the virus.
Beijing made unsubstantiated accusations that the US developed the virus in a military basewhile some US media questioned whether the virus could have leaked from a research center in Wuhan, the city where covid was originally detected.
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