Chinese social media is buzzing after government officials resurrected a conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus originated in a biolab at US military base Fort Detrick. @firstdraftnews spotted the Maryland base at the top of Weibo's chart of trending topics yesterday:

Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have a history of bringing up the groundless theory when they are faced with questions about China's role in the pandemic's start. “Fort Detrick” was mentioned in this manner by Ministry spokespeople in May 2020 & July 2020 press conferences

On Jan 18 — in response to a question about the US State Dept's recently-published fact sheet on the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the Ministry brought up Fort Detrick again, calling on the US to open the lab and invite @WHO experts for origin tracing

Subsequently, the Communist Youth League of China and several Chinese media outlets posted on Weibo videos that highlight Fort Detrick's biomedical research and accusations about its role in the 2001 anthrax attacks

The number of eyes these videos and related hashtags are getting on Weibo is concerning — posts published alongside hashtags relevant to Fort Detrick have racked up billions of views as of January 21

Also circulating again is a now-deleted FB post from Aug 2020 claiming the new coronavirus originated in Fort Detrick. At the time, @thedailybeast & @adico11 linked the post to a pro-China disinformation campaign pushing the “American virus” narrative

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pro-china-conspiracy-campaign-attacks-covid-drugmaker

The revival of the Fort Detrick conspiracy theory has led to calls for investigations of the US, not just on Chinese-language social media but also on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. This comes as @WHO investigators arrived in Wuhan mid-January to look into virus origins