Blaming China for COVID-19 "groundless:" Russian media

MOSCOW, June 4 (Xinhua) -- It is unfounded for the United States to accuse China of causing the COVID-19 pandemic, a columnist of Russia's RIA Novosti news agency has said.

"The only information on which the whole anti-Chinese narrative is based" is an article in The Wall Street Journal, "which claimed that even before the official start of the pandemic, some scientists in Wuhan city in central China fell ill with something similar to the coronavirus. However, this whole story is absolutely murky and groundless," Victoria Nikiforova said in a commentary this week.

She noted that the "entertaining" timeline of events that happened in the summer and autumn of 2019 is alarming.

"The famous U.S. military biological laboratory, Fort Detrick, suddenly closed in August. The most dangerous viruses and bacteria on the planet were stored and researched at the facility," she wrote.

"The lovingly selected collection contains anthrax, smallpox and plague. Classified scientists were creatively experimenting with these samples, developing new and even more dangerous options on their basis," the journalist added.

Nikiforova noted that suddenly the Fort Detrick laboratory closed due to some kind of a leak, and there is no information about what exactly has escaped, where and in what quantities.

"In September 2019, a strange lung disease epidemic started in the United States. At first, they said it was linked to vaping ... Symptoms of the disease very closely resembled those experienced by COVID-19 patients," she said.

Some experts think that COVID-19 was brought to Wuhan when the U.S. military participated in an international sports competition in the Chinese city in October 2019, according to Nikiforova.