Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in the west, some mainstream media outlets have gone out of their way to painstakingly promote a number of specific Covid-19 origin theories. Two of the leading themes have been the ‘contaminated bat soup’ and the ‘wet markets’ narratives.
In writing When Tedros Moves His Lips, Beijing Speaks, I deployed several AI agents that have been monitoring SM and MSM Covid-19 related internet traffic. The agents regularly report whenever certain imagery, phrases, or topics appear on the internet. Over the past 2 weeks the system has picked up patterns of reuse of verbiage related to the origin of the virus. For some reason, older narratives get constantly re-inserted into the news feeds and political speeches.
Three such illustrative examples are:
- That the consumption of contaminated bat soup was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan
- That the Chinese were selling and even now continue to sell bats at various ‘Wet markets’
- That there is no correlation between the Covid-19 virus and the virus specimens that were isolated from bats in 2014 and worked on in the WIV lab
It is interesting to note that all three of these topics are an integral part of the Chinese government’s propaganda that the Covid-19 virus originated in the wild where it accidently jumped from infected bats to some intermediary host or directly to humans.
Image 1: An infographic from a Sun article titled “MISSING LINK Coronavirus outbreak could be linked to bat soup say scientists” by Gemma Mullin, Digital Health Reporter published 1/24/2020 and updated on 2/5/2020
Image 2: 2/29/2020, The New York Times and CBS promoting the narrative that Covid-19 originated from the Wuhan Wet markets
Based on a large body of imagery and source linkage analysis, these three claims can be shown to be decidedly false, most likely originally produced as a part of an organized disinformation campaign. So, why are MSM outlets like the Sun, DailyMail and the Daily Caller continuing to regurgitate and publish articles supporting this messaging? One possible explanation could be just laziness and poor investigative skills; another could be that it provides a comforting alternative to the strong possibility that the Covid-19 outbreak originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latter option would certainly be in-line with undisclosed MSM commercial interests of some sort and the old maxim that one can excuse incompetence but not so dishonesty and negligence. Another convenient bi-product of promoting the force majeure origin narrative is that it would allow China to mount an effective legal defense against the flood of lawsuit heading their way.
The composite in Image 2 illustrates the false basis for the ongoing MSM ‘contaminated bat soup’ and ‘wet market’ origin claims.
Image 3: Examples of ongoing false media claims and disinformation about bats being sold in ‘Wet Markets’ and eaten in China
The composite in Image 4 traces one of the early mimic sources for the ‘contaminated bat soup’ to one of several foreign intelligence influence operations, an account named “Restitutor Orientis”, a French language Twitter alias affiliated with Turkish intelligence.
Image 4: Sampling of the Covid-19 related influence operations by the Twitter account “Restitutor Orientis”
References and Sourcing
XRVision Sentinel AI Platform – Face recognition, image reconstruction, and object classification
Copyright 2020 Yaacov Apelbaum, All Rights Reserved.