Hua Chunying responded to the Harvard University COVID-19 paper full of loopholes. Let’s take a look at the details!

The American Broadcasting Corporation reported that a recent Harvard University paper, through analysis of traffic flow and keyword search volume near several hospitals in Wuhan, concluded that the new coronavirus outbreak may have occurred in Wuhan as early as the end of August last year. The paper has been strongly questioned by some experts and media, who believe that the paper contains a large number of obvious and low-level loopholes.

On June 10, the World Health Organization responded by saying that one should not read too much into the changes in the number of cars in hospital parking lots and then jump two or three steps to draw inferences linking this to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, such a paper was forwarded by some American politicians and used as evidence to accuse China of concealing the epidemic. All these factors make people suspect that the paper may be a composition.

In response to this, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying pointed out at a regular press conference held today that in addition to using the number of cars in the parking lot to infer the time when the new coronavirus first occurred, this paper also has several very obvious loopholes.

First, Harvard University’s academic platform is just an open database that collects and preserves research materials of faculty and researchers. It is not a peer-reviewed publication. Does this paper represent the official views and standards of Harvard Medical School, or is it just the work of an individual or a few people?

Second, one of the authors of the paper happened to be a writer for the American Broadcasting Corporation who exclusively reported the paper, and happened to have obtained more data and reported it before the paper was even pre-released.

Third, the times marked on some of the charts in the paper are actually May 2019. I don’t know if this is an unintentional oversight or if there are some other problems.

Fourth, regarding the search volume for cough and diarrhea, which is considered to be one of the key pieces of evidence in the paper, I noticed that some Chinese media have also conducted some in-depth research and found that the search volume for the two keywords cough and diarrhea cited in the paper in September 2019 was not as good as the same period in 2017 and 2018.

Hua Chunying pointed out that in fact, it is really strange that such a serious issue as the virus tracing and the investigation and research on the outbreak was handled in such a non-serious manner. However, such a so-called "paper" full of loopholes and shoddy workmanship was regarded as a treasure by some American politicians and media, who spread it widely and regarded it as new evidence that China concealed the epidemic. Behind this extremely ridiculous phenomenon, his intention is probably not so ridiculous. I think this should be new evidence that some people in the United States coordinated, organized, and deliberately created and spread false information against China, which should be unanimously condemned and boycotted by the international community.