China mounts social media campaign to pass on coronavirus blame to USA

In order to counter Washington which has been calling the contagion 'Wuhan Virus', Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Thursday said on Twitter that "it might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan", said the report.

Promoting conspiracy theories to deflect blame for the contagion, Ligian posted a link to an article from a website that publishes conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks in the US.

The AFP report said that China is now disowning its own initial assessment, which said the novel coronavirus had spread from a seafood market in Wuhan, the capital city of China's Hubei province.

China had placed Wuhan and the entire Hubei province with 56 million people under strict quarantine to prevent the spread of the disease to the rest of the country.

However, as the number of new cases of COVID-19 began to fall in China and increase in rest of the world, the country has begun to push narratives that the virus didn't originate on its soil

The AFP said, the efforts gathered strength after Zhong Nanshan, an expert associated with the National Health Commission told reporters that the epidemic started in China, but didn't necessarily originate there.

However, scientific assessments across the world have suspected that the virus was first transmitted to a human being from Wuhan seafood market before spreading outside the country.

The genetic analysis of novel coronavirus samples collected across the world has shown the virus has a common ancestor in China, but this is not in any way blaming a particular country, Christl Donnelly, a professor of statistical epidemiology Imperial College London, was reported as saying by the news agency

However, the blame game between China and US is not likely to wane away anytime soon with US angering China by terming the novel coronavirus 'Wuhan Virus'.

After US Secretary Mike Pompeo called the deadly contagion 'Wuhan Virus', China's Foreign Ministry rejected connotation as "despicable" and "disrespecting science".

Without paying heed to the protest, US President Donald Trump, too, on Wednesday, in a televised address to his nation, spoke about the outbreak to have started in China.