Day: February 20, 2021

It took just three months for the rumor that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was engineered as a bioweapon to spread from the fringes of the Chinese internet and take root in millions of people’s minds.By March 2020, belief that the virus had been human-made and possibly weaponized was widespread, multiple surveys indicated. The Pew Research Center found, for example, that one in three Americans believed the new coronavirus had been created in a lab; one in four thought it had been engineered intentionally.This chaos was, at least in part, manufactured.Powerful forces, from Beijing and Washington to Moscow and Tehran, have battled to control the narrative about where the virus came from. Leading officials and allied media in all four countries functioned as super-spreaders of disinformation, using their stature to sow doubt and amplify politically expedient conspiracies already in circulation, a nine-month Associated Press investigation of state-sponsored disinformation conducted in collaboration with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. The analysis was based on a review of millions of social media postings and articles on Twitter, Facebook, VK, Weibo, WeChat, YouTube, Telegram, and other platforms.Disinformation leaderAs the pandemic swept the world, it was China — not Russia — that took the lead in spreading foreign disinformation about COVID-19 virus’s origins.Beijing was reacting to weeks of fiery rhetoric from leading U.S. Republicans, including then-President Donald Trump, who sought to rebrand COVID-19 virus as “the China virus.”China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Beijing has worked to promote friendship and serve facts, while defending itself against hostile forces seeking to politicize the pandemic.“All parties should firmly say ‘no’ to the dissemination of disinformation,” the ministry said in a statement to AP, but added, “In the face of trumped-up charges, it is justified and proper to bust lies and clarify rumors by setting out the facts.”FILE – Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian takes a question at the daily media briefing in Beijing on April 8, 2020.The day after the World Health Organization designated the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shot off a series of late-night tweets that launched what may be the party’s first truly global digital experiment with overt disinformation.Chinese diplomats have only recently mobilized on Western social media platforms, more than tripling their Twitter accounts and more than doubling their Facebook accounts since late 2019. Both platforms are banned in China.”When did patient zero begin in US?” Zhao tweeted on March 12. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe (sic) us an explanation!”What happened next showcases the power of China’s global messaging machine.Spray of tweetsOn Twitter alone, Zhao’s aggressive spray of 11 tweets on March 12 and 13 was cited more than 99,000 times over the next six weeks, in at least 54 languages, according to an analysis conducted by DFRLab. The accounts that referenced him had nearly 275 million followers on Twitter, a number that almost certainly includes duplicate followers and does not distinguish fake accounts.Influential conservatives on Twitter, including Donald Trump Jr., hammered Zhao, propelling his tweets to their largest audiences.China’s Global Times and at least 30 Chinese diplomatic accounts, from France to Panama, rushed in to support Zhao. Venezuela’s foreign minister and RT’s correspondent in Caracas, as well as Saudi accounts close to the kingdom’s royal family, also significantly extended Zhao’s reach, helping launch his ideas into Spanish and Arabic.FILE – The logo of Sina Corp.’s Chinese microblogging site, Weibo, on a screen, Beijing, September 2011.His accusations got uncritical treatment in Russian and Iranian state media and shot back through QAnon discussion boards. But his biggest audience, by far, lay within China itself — even though Twitter is banned there. Popular hashtags about his tweetstorm were viewed 314 million times on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, which does not distinguish unique views.Late on the night of March 13, Zhao posted a message of gratitude on his personal Weibo: “Thank you for your support to me, let us work hard for the motherland ??!”China leaned on Russian disinformation strategy and infrastructure, turning to an established network of Kremlin proxies to seed and spread messaging. In January, Russian state media were the first to legitimize the theory that the U.S. engineered the virus as a weapon. Russian politicians soon joined the chorus.”One was amplifying the other. How much it was command controlled, how much it was opportunistic, it was hard to tell,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia.FILE – Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech, in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2021. (Official Khamenei Website/Handout via Reuters)Iran participatesIran also jumped in. The same day Zhao tweeted that the virus might have come from the U.S. Army, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced COVID-19 could be the result of a biological attack. He would later cite that conspiracy to justify refusing COVID-19 aid from the U.S.Ten days after Zhao’s first conspiratorial tweets, China’s global state media apparatus kicked in.”Did the U.S. government intentionally conceal the reality of COVID-19 with the flu?” asked a suggestive op-ed in Mandarin published by China Radio International on March 22. “Why was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick in Maryland, the largest biochemical testing base, shut down in July 2019?”Within days, versions of the piece appeared more than 350 times in Chinese state outlets, mostly in Mandarin, but also around the world in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic, AP found.China’s Embassy in France promoted the story on Twitter and Facebook. It appeared on YouTube, Weibo, WeChat and a host of Chinese video platforms, including Haokan, Xigua, Baijiahao, Bilibili, iQIYI, Kuaishou and Youku. A seven-second version set to driving music appeared on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.No consequences”Clearly pushing these kinds of conspiracy theories, disinformation, does not usually result in any negative consequences for them,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow in the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund.In April, Russia and Iran largely dropped the bioweapon conspiracy in their overt messaging.China, however, has carried on.In January, as a team from the World Health Organization poured through records in China to try to pinpoint the origins of the virus, spokeswoman Hua Chunying of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged the U.S. to “open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas biolabs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States.”Her remarks went viral in China.China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told AP it resolutely opposes spreading conspiracy theories.”We have not done it before and will not do it in the future,” the ministry said in a statement. “False information is the common enemy of mankind, and China has always opposed the creation and spread of false information.”  
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Argentina’s health minister has resigned after he reportedly gave preferential treatment to those with personal connections when authorizing coronavirus vaccinations.The Associated Press reported that President Alberto Fernández, through his chief of staff, asked for Minister of Health Ginés González García’s resignation Friday after a high-profile local journalist said he had been vaccinated after personally asking the minister.González García had led the country’s COVID-19 strategy.The journalist was one of at least 10 people reported to have been inoculated without following protocol.The scandal heightened concerns about corruption in the region, as well as access to limited doses of vaccines.Two Cabinet officials in Peru resigned earlier this month following reports of hundreds of Peruvian officials inappropriately receiving vaccine doses.Praise from WHOMeanwhile, the World Health Organization said it welcomed the recent pledges of coronavirus vaccines from several Western countries to the international health group that will help ensure an equitable allocation of vaccines around the world.FILE – Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, speaks during a session of the Executive Board on the coronavirus disease outbreak, in Geneva, Jan. 21, 2021.“There is a growing movement behind vaccine equity, and I welcome that world leaders are stepping up to the challenge by making new commitments to effectively end this pandemic by sharing doses and increasing funds to COVAX,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said recently. COVAX is the mechanism WHO established for the global distribution of coronavirus vaccines.German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday that the pandemic would not end until the world was vaccinated. In remarks after the videoconference of leaders of the G-7, the group of the largest, developed economies, she said Germany and other wealthy countries might need to give some of their own stock of vaccines to developing nations.French President Emmanuel Macron told the conference that Europe and the United States must quickly send enough COVID-19 vaccine doses to Africa to inoculate the continent’s health care workers or risk losing influence to Russia and China.The coronavirus death toll on the African continent surpassed 100,000 Friday, as African countries struggle to obtain vaccines to counteract the pandemic.South Africa alone accounts for nearly half of the confirmed deaths in Africa, with more than 48,000, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center in the U.S. The country, which is facing its own variant of the virus, also accounts for nearly half the confirmed cases in the region, with more than 1.5 million. Total cases across the African continent are more than 3.8 million.The 54-nation continent of about 1.3 billion people reached 100,000 deaths shortly after marking one year since the first coronavirus case was confirmed on the continent, in Egypt on February 14, 2020.The actual death toll from the virus in Africa is believed to be higher than the official count as some who died were likely never included in confirmed tallies.FILE – A container with doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus disease is loaded into a truck, at the airport in Luque, Paraguay, Feb. 18, 2021.Russian vaccinesRussia’s deputy prime minister said Saturday on state television that Russia was on target to produce 88 million coronavirus vaccine doses in the first six months of 2021. Tatiana Golikova said 83 million of the doses would be the Sputnik V vaccine.Russia’s prime minister, also speaking on state television Saturday, said that Russia had approved a third coronavirus vaccine for domestic use.Mikhail Mishustin said the first 120,000 doses of CoviVac, produced by the Chumakov Centre in St. Petersburg, would be released in March.California’s governor said his state would set aside 10% of its vaccines for teachers and school employees, beginning March 1. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged U.S. school districts to reopen, teachers unions have pushed back against the action, saying safety precautions, such as vaccines for school staff, need to be in place first.Denmark is imposing stricter regulations at some of its border crossings with Germany and has temporarily closed others because of a COVID-19 outbreak in the German town of Flensburg.“Therefore, we are now introducing considerably more intense border checks and closing a number of smaller border crossings along the Danish-German border,” Danish Justice Minister Nick Haekkerup said in a statement.Johns Hopkins reported Saturday afternoon EST that there were more than 110,940,000 global COVID-19 cases.  The U.S. had more cases than any other country with 28 million, followed by India with 10.9 million and Brazil with 10 million. Global deaths were more than 2.4 million.FILE – A child wearing a mask to protect against the coronavirus rests on the bank of the Yangtze River in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province, April 16, 2020.Book dealA major publishing company has picked up a self-published children’s book, illustrated with simple line drawings, about a little boy struggling with all the changes in his life because of the COVID-19 pandemic.When Can I Go Back to School was written by Anna Friend, a theater director, about her son Billy. She told The Guardian newspaper, “I wrote the book to try and understand what was happening to him.”She asked Jake Biggin, a friend who is an artist, to do the illustrations. They started selling the book on Amazon and now they have a deal with Scholastic.  
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The World Health Organization says it welcomes the recent pledges of coronavirus vaccines from several Western countries to the international health group that will help ensure an equitable allocation of vaccines to countries around the world.“There is a growing movement behind vaccine equity, and I welcome that world leaders are stepping up to the challenge by making new commitments to effectively end this pandemic by sharing doses and increasing funds to COVAX,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said recently. COVAX is the global mechanism WHO established for the global distribution of coronavirus vaccines.German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday the pandemic will not end until the world is vaccinated. In remarks after the video conference of leaders of the G-7, the group of the largest, developed economies, she said Germany and other wealthy countries may need to give some of their own stock of vaccines to developing nations.French President Emmanuel Macron told the conference that Europe and the United States must quickly send enough COVID-19 vaccine doses to Africa to inoculate the continent’s health care workers or risk losing influence to Russia and China.The coronavirus death toll on the African continent surpassed 100,000 Friday, as African countries struggle to obtain vaccines to counteract the pandemic.South Africa alone accounts for nearly half of the confirmed deaths in Africa, with more than 48,000, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The country, which is facing its own variant of the virus, also accounts for nearly half the confirmed cases in the region, with more than 1.5 million. Total cases across the African continent are more than 3.8 million.The 54-nation continent of about 1.3 billion people reached 100,000 deaths shortly after marking one year since the first coronavirus case was confirmed on the continent, in Egypt on Feb. 14, 2020.The actual death toll from the virus in Africa is believed to be higher than the official count as some who died were likely never included in confirmed tallies.Visitors wear face masks while walking the pier amid the COVID-19 pandemic Feb. 19, 2021, in Santa Monica, Calif.Russia’s deputy prime minister said Saturday on state television that Russia is on target to produce 88 million coronavirus vaccine doses in the first six months of 2021. Tatiana Golikova said 83 million of the doses will be the Sputnik V vaccine.Russia’s prime minister, also speaking on state television Saturday, said that Russia has approved a third coronavirus vaccine for domestic use.Mikhail Mishustin said the first 120,000 doses of CoviVac, produced by the Chumakov Centre in St. Petersburg, will be released in March.California’s governor says his state will set aside 10% of its vaccines for teachers and school employees, beginning March 1. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged U.S. school districts to reopen, teachers’ unions have pushed back against the action, saying safety precautions, such as vaccines for school staff, need to be in place first.Denmark is imposing stricter regulations at some of its border crossings with Germany and has temporarily closed others because of a COVID-19 outbreak in the German town of Flensburg.A sign encourages visitors to wear face masks amid the COVID-19 pandemic Feb. 19, 2021, in Santa Monica, Calif.“Therefore, we are now introducing considerably more intense border checks and closing a number of smaller border crossings along the Danish-German border,” Danish Justice Minister Nick Haekkerup said in a statement.Johns Hopkins reported early Saturday that there are 110,747,370 global COVID-19 cases. The U.S. has more cases than any other country with 28 million, followed by India with 10.9 million and Brazil with 10 million.A major publishing company has picked up a self-published children’s book, illustrated with simple line drawings, about a little boy struggling with all the changes in his life due to the COVID-19 pandemic.When Can I Go Back To School was written by Anna Friend, a theater director, about her son Billy. She told The Guardian newspaper, “I wrote the book to try and understand what was happening to him.”She asked Jake Biggin, a friend who is an artist, to do the illustrations. They started selling the book on Amazon and now they have a deal with Scholastic.
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google fired staff scientist Margaret Mitchell on Friday, they both said, a move that fanned company divisions on academic freedom and diversity that were on display since its December dismissal of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru.Google said in a statement that Mitchell violated the company’s code of conduct and security policies by moving electronic files outside the company. Mitchell, who announced her firing on Twitter, did not respond to a request for comment.Google’s ethics in artificial intelligence work has been under scrutiny since the firing of Gebru, a scientist who gained prominence for exposing bias in facial analysis systems. The dismissal prompted thousands of Google workers to protest. She and Mitchell had called for greater diversity and inclusion among Google’s research staff and expressed concern that the company was starting to censor papers critical of its products.Gebru said Google fired her after she questioned an order not to publish a study saying AI that mimics language could hurt marginalized populations. Mitchell, a co-author of the paper, publicly criticized the company for firing Gebru and undermining the credibility of her work.The pair for about two years had co-led the ethical AI team, started by Mitchell.Google AI research director Zoubin Ghahramani and a company lawyer informed Mitchell’s team of her firing on Friday in a meeting called at short notice, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person said little explanation was given for the dismissal. Google declined to comment.The company said Mitchell’s firing followed disciplinary recommendations by investigators and a review committee. It said her violations “included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.” The investigation began Jan. 19.Google employee Alex Hanna said on Twitter the company was running a “smear campaign” against Mitchell and Gebru, with whom she worked closely. Google declined to comment on Hanna’s remarks.Google has recruited top scientists with promises of research freedom, but the limits are tested as researchers increasingly write about the negative effects of technology and offer unflattering perspectives on their employer’s products.Reuters reported exclusively in December that Google introduced a new “sensitive topics” review last year to ensure that papers on topics such as the oil industry and content recommendation systems would not get the company into legal or regulatory trouble. Mitchell publicly expressed concern that the policy could lead to censorship.Google reiterated to researchers in a memo and meeting on Friday that it was working to improve pre-publication review of papers. It also announced new policies on Friday to handle sensitive departures and evaluate executives based on team diversity and inclusion.
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The coronavirus death toll on the African continent surpassed 100,000 on Friday, as African countries struggled to obtain vaccines to counteract the pandemic.South Africa alone accounts for nearly half of the confirmed deaths in Africa with 48,859, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The country, which is facing its own variant of the virus, also accounts for nearly half the confirmed cases in the region, with more than 1.5 million. Total cases across the African continent are more than 3.8 million.The 54-nation continent of about 1.3 billion people reached the milestone of 100,000 deaths shortly after marking one year since the first coronavirus case was confirmed on the continent, in Egypt on Feb. 14, 2020.The actual death toll from the virus in Africa is believed to be higher than the official count as some who died were likely never included in confirmed tallies.Countries across the continent are only beginning to see the arrival of coronavirus vaccines, months after some wealthier countries are well under way in the process of vaccinating their most vulnerable populations.United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday that the global manufacturing capacity of coronavirus vaccines needs to double to meet global demand.In a virtual address to this year’s Munich Security Conference, he called for a global vaccination plan to ensure an equitable vaccine distribution and said the biggest world powers must work together.Backdropped by a national flag, a doctor waits to receive a dose of the Russian COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V at the Ana Francisca Perez de Leon II public hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Feb. 19, 2021.Without naming the United States and China, he said, “Our world cannot afford a future where the two largest economies split the globe into two opposing areas in a Great Fracture.”U.S. President Joe Biden announced Friday the U.S. would soon begin releasing $4 billion it pledged to a global campaign to bolster the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries. The funds were approved by Congress in December, but former President Donald Trump had declined to participate in the program.At his first meeting as president with world leaders at the Munich Security Conference, Biden announced the financial support for COVAX, a coalition tasked with distributing vaccines to low- and middle-income countries.“Even as we fight to get out of the teeth of this pandemic, a resurgence of Ebola in Africa is a stark reminder that we must simultaneously work to finally finance health security, strengthen global health systems, and create early warning systems to prevent, detect and respond to future biological threats, because they will keep coming,” Biden said at the virtual meeting.German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the pandemic will not end until the world is vaccinated. In remarks after the video conference of leaders of the G-7 group of large, developed economies, she said Germany and other wealthy countries may need to give some of their own stock of vaccines to developing nations.French President Emmanuel Macron told the conference that Europe and the United States must quickly send enough COVID-19 vaccine doses to Africa to inoculate the continent’s health care workers or risk losing influence to Russia and China.”If we announce billions today to supply doses in six months, eight months, a year, our friends in Africa will, under justified pressure from their people, buy doses from the Chinese and the Russians,” Macron told the conference.A man and child wearing face masks to protect against the spread of the coronavirus walk past lanterns at a public park in Beijing on Feb. 19, 2021.Also Friday, Brazil reported 1,308 additional COVID-19 deaths and 51,050 new confirmed cases of the virus on Friday, according to data released by the Health Ministry.The South American nation has now recorded more than 243,000 deaths and more than 100 million cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins.In Russia, officials reported Friday 13,433 new coronavirus cases in the previous 24-hour period and 470 deaths.Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases said a new COVID-19 variant has emerged at a Tokyo immigration facility.A day after the Australian state of Victoria lifted its COVID-19 five-day lockdown, three family members tested positive for the coronavirus. Two of the three had quarantined at the Holiday Inn at the Melbourne airport.Health officials in Spain say they have given a full two-shot course of the coronavirus vaccines to almost all the country’s elderly nursing home residents.Officials in the United States extended land border closures with Canada and Mexico for another 30 days. The extension is the first announced since President Biden took office in January.White House officials said Friday that the distribution of the vaccine has been held up in all 50 states by winter storms and power outages. They say the country has a backlog of 6 million vaccine doses, but that the federal government expects to be caught up by next week.In another development Friday, pharmaceutical partners Pfizer and BioNTech said a new study they conducted indicates their COVID-19 vaccine can remain effective when stored in standard freezers for up to two weeks.If the finding is approved, it would be a significant development since one of the initial drawbacks of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was that it was required to be stored in ultra-low-temperature freezers not commonly found in standard clinics and pharmacies.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Friday that data collected in the first month of vaccinations in the United States have found no concerning new issues with either the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or the Moderna vaccine.It said data collected from the administration of 13.8 million doses of vaccine between Dec. 14, 2020, and Jan. 13, 2021, showed 6,994 reports of adverse events after vaccination, with 90.8% of them classified as nonserious and 9.2% as serious.There are more than 110 million global cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins. The United States tops the list with nearly 28 million infections. India is second with nearly 11 million cases, followed by Brazil with more than 10 million.
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The United States has officially rejoined the Paris Agreement after the Trump administration abandoned the global climate pact saying it was too costly for business.  VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports.Produced by:  Kimberlyn Weeks   
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