Social-media users in China are obsessing over a conspiracy theory claiming the COVID-19 virus was produced by US-linked laboratories in Ukraine

• An article claiming the coronavirus emerged from US-linked labs in Ukraine has gone viral in China.
• A thread discussing the Global Times article has 1.67 billion views on the Chinese platform Weibo.

Social-media users in China have been obsessing over a conspiracy theory claiming the COVID-19 coronavirus was produced by US-linked laboratories in Ukraine.

The buzz centers on an article titled "Research verifies that COVID was manufactured by an American company," published by China's state-linked tabloid Global Times on Wednesday.

A topic thread on China's Twitter-like Weibo platform discussing the article went viral early Wednesday. As of press time, it had been viewed 1.67 billion times and spawned 292,000 comment threads.

The coronavirus was first detected in late 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, though its exact origins are unclear. A leading theory is that it first passed to humans from animals at a market in Wuhan where live animals were sold, though some believe the virus may have accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan that studies coronaviruses.

The Global Times article, which was republished by 45 other Chinese outlets, purported that Global Times had come "one step closer to the truth" regarding the virus' origins. It also claimed the Russian army had "found a lot of evidence in Ukraine" of US-linked laboratories producing biological weapons.

"Among them, it was also found that the United States is using bats to study coronaviruses and has produced components for biological weapons," the Global Times said.

The article also claimed there was "heavy evidence" of Russia having found documents bearing the "signatures of US government officials and the seals of relevant US government departments."

"When the truth is revealed, America will fall! When the truth is completely revealed, let us wait and see!" the article said.

The Global Times did not provide visual or documented evidence in the article to back up its claims.

Many Weibo users expressed their outrage over the article, with some calling for the US to be investigated and others suggesting US officials should be executed as "war criminals."

It is unclear where and when this new theory about the coronavirus' origins was seeded.

It appears to have its roots in a wild proposition touted by the American conspiracy-theory site Infowars and spread by Russian and Chinese news outlets that the US is operating biological-weapons laboratories in Ukrainian cities that have come under attack from Russia. Rumors about these "secret US bio-weapons labs" spread like wildfire on Weibo, with the media and social-media commenters seizing upon the topic.

China has previously spread baseless conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 virus was created in Fort Detrick, a US Army base, and that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was killing older people.