The coronavirus outbreak in China has provided fertile ground for conspiracy theories and misinformation on the web everywhere, but in Russia they are spreading the news in prime time.
Russian television is also unique in having a consistent general momentum: that Western elites and especially the US are somehow guilty.
One of the main national television networks, Channel One, has even launched a regular space dedicated to coronavirus conspiracy theories in its main evening news program, Vremya (“Weather”).
The style of the reports is ambiguous, as it seems to discredit the theories and leave the viewers with the impression that they contain a core of truth.
One of the wildest ideas recently transmitted by Vremya is that the presence of the word “corona,” which means crown in Latin and Russian, in the word coronavirus suggests that Donald Trump is involved in some way.
The origin of the name comes due to its crown shape, but the Vremya presenter warns against the rejection of the idea.
“Nonsense, you will say, and I agree with you, if it were not for what is in our correspondent’s report,” he says.
Ethnic Biological Weapon
Later in the video he admits that the crown theory is a “strange construction,” but he presents without criticism an expert who says that the strain of the Chinese coronavirus has been artificially created, and that American intelligence agencies or American pharmaceutical companies are behind it.
The report also reaffirms the old and false claims of the Kremlin media and officials that the United States had a laboratory in Georgia where it tested a biological weapon in humans.
He acknowledges that there is clear evidence that refutes this, but adds suggestively: “Even experts who are cautious in their evaluations say that nothing can be ruled out.”
The essential thing is to suggest that several Western actors (pharmaceutical companies, the US or their agencies) are somehow involved in helping to create or spread the virus, or at least in spreading panic about it.
It is said that the objective is, in the case of “Big Pharma”, to take advantage of the creation of a vaccine against the coronavirus or, in the case of the United States, to hit the Chinese economy to weaken a geopolitical competitor.
Blood tests for officials.
Away from the television screens, the outbreak of coronavirus seems to be causing great concern among Russian officials.
Rail and air traffic to China has been reduced, and Russians evacuated from China have been quarantined for two weeks in a Siberian sanitarium.
A church in Moscow has even celebrated a service to pray for the salvation of the coronavirus.
The fear of the virus seems to reach the top.
The Russian newspaper Vedomosti reports that the Kremlin has introduced temperature controls for those attending the event with President Vladimir Putin, in what spokesman Dmitry Peskov has called a “precautionary measure.”
To be honest, being in 2020, we cannot rule out the intervention of “forces of evil” to so call them, in the creation or spread of the virus, especially of US origin. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to know about the long history of the United States in infecting / killing entire populations using biological weapons. Biological weapons can be any chemical used for the alteration of the normal state of the human body, going from aspartame in meals, hormones in meats, carcinogens in cosmetics / food and aluminum in water / air / sea etc all regulated by US FDA whose board members tend to be ex big pharma execs. In these cases we thank the bodies of the EU and other countries where their reign does not arrive.
