[bluish29]

> payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic

Maybe it is wrong but I did not read much about China blaming US for pandemic outside couple of articles claiming that on US media (including this one) while a lot American media, politicians and ordinary people used to blame China for pandemic since the beginning. I think this is just trying to justify this campaign as a reaction mechanism by the author while he admitted that it had put lives in risk and probably was indirectly cause of death for some. And the rest of article is good.

[anigbrowl]

I think this is just trying to justify this campaign as a reaction mechanism by the author

Consider who was President at the time.

[lesuorac]

I would imagine China has little reason to claim in english that it's the US bioweapon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...

[aragonite]

Well, it's more like: they tweeted links to published claims that it was a US bioweapon from a think-tank based in Montreal (Global Research Canada), in direct response to outright claims by US politicians & government officials that it was a Chinese bioweapon. You can read a detailed timeline in this report from the Atlantic Council:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/W...

[lesuorac]

The citations on wikipedia don't seem to be about tweets. Although you may be correct about the tit-for-tat nature; two wrongs do not make a right. China's government intentional stoked conspiracy stories and this nearly-whataboutism doesn't actually help anybody figure out what's going on.

ex. https://web.archive.org/web/20210220164052/https://qz.com/

> Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said on Monday (Jan. 18) at a press conference that the US should open Fort Detrick, a military medical research base in Maryland, for further investigation as a possible origin of Covid-19

> ...

> Hua made the remark in response to a question on China’s reaction to a statement last week from the outgoing US state secretary Mike Pompeo, who said the US government has “reasons to believe” some staffers at China’s state-owned Wuhan Institute of Virology developed symptoms that were consistent with “both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses” in autumn 2019

Pompeo's comments: https://2017-2021.state.gov/ensuring-a-transparent-thorough-...

[pessimizer]

You're talking about "whataboutism" in a thread about the Pentagon and General Dynamics intentionally spreading misinformation about Chinese vaccines across Asia, including that they contained pork. If that's not "whataboutism" then "whataboutism" is a meaningless, disgusting term forced on Americans in the 50's to explain why the US shouldn't answer for apartheid, but socialism was the worst danger the world had ever seen.