How Russia's invasion of Ukraine, vampire obsession, and 'secret bio-weapons' have played into China's narrative about COVID-19's origin

• On Thursday, Chinese media pounced on a Russian claim that the US tested bat coronaviruses in Ukrainian laboratories.
• The supposed findings have provided China with an avenue to support its narrative on COVID-19's origin.

Cross a love for vampires with the invasion of Ukraine, and one ends up with secret US biological weapons that led to the spread of COVID-19, at least according to Chinese social media users and state-affiliated news outlets.

"There is no smoke without fire," the Chinese Communist Party-linked tabloid Global Times wrote in an opinion piece published Thursday.

"Some netizens commented that the Americans seem to have a special preference for making vampire-themed movies, and the prototype of the vampire comes from bat. The Americans' experiments with bat coronavirus have cultural origins," said the piece.

The Times article is the latest in China's coverage of the Kremlin's claims that it has uncovered "evidence that the US was involved in biological weapons research in Ukrainian labs" — a debunked conspiracy theory linked to far-right website InfoWars and Twitter users.

Chinese media outlets have also seized upon new claims from Russia that the so-called US-funded biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine had been experimenting on "pathogens that can be transmitted from bats to humans," including coronaviruses.

The supposed findings have provided China with an opportunity to push back against one of its most despised COVID-19 narratives — that the virus had leaked out of a lab in Wuhan — while also propping up Beijing's stance that it was the US Army that manufactured the coronavirus and planted it in China.

Official state media such as People's Daily and Xinhua did not mention COVID-19 in their reports about Russia's claims.

However, on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform, some users were already connecting the news to the pandemic as of Thursday night.

"American virus," said the top comment, which received over 55,000 likes, on the People's Daily article.

"The novel coronavirus was created by America," said another comment, which picked up more than 33,000 likes.

"I was already puzzled from the beginning that they could associate a seafood market with bats. It turns out they knew the truth," wrote another commenter, likely referring to recent studies that point to the Huanan Seafood Market in China's Wuhan city as being the source of the coronavirus. The comment received 11,000 likes.

Earlier this week, China's foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian — who once fiercely promoted Beijing's COVID-19 origin theory on Twitter — called on the US to "give a full account of its biological military activities at home and abroad and subject itself to multilateral verification."

He also reminded reporters about Fort Detrick, a discontinued biological weapons base in Maryland at the center of China's conspiracy theory.

Meanwhile, the US has denied Russia's claim that it has been producing biological weapons in Ukraine.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the accusations "preposterous" and noted that Chinese officials had echoed "conspiracy theories" about the supposed laboratories, which were first propagated by Russia.

"Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine or to create a false flag operation using them," she added.