A Facebook (FB) post misrepresented a legitimate news report and falsely claimed the arrest in late January of a Harvard University professor was related to the coronavirus disease that has infected more than 2.7 million people worldwide.
Grabbed from a Jan. 28 newscast by U.S. television station WCBV Boston, the report is not about the arrest that day of “the man behind COVID-19” but of Charles Lieber, the university’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology department head, for allegedly concealing his research engagements with China from federal investigators.
The nearly two-minute-long segment makes no mention of COVID-19.
The netizen also falsely wrote in her caption that the arrest happened April 5, the day she published the clip on her FB account, and that officials found that Lieber “manufactured and sold the coronavirus to China.”
Lieber was arrested after the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that he concealed funding from the Wuhan University of Technology and that he received over $1.5 million to set up a research lab in China, while working at Harvard and receiving grants from the U.S. Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health.
The inaccurate FB post was published a few days after U.S. President Donald Trump cast doubt on the accuracy of China’s coronavirus numbers, referring to it as “a little bit on the light side.” It was revived after reports surfaced on April 16 of a Chinese research paper proposing the virus “likely” came from a lab in Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first detected. Chinese authorities have clamped down on its publication.
The netizen’s false FB post has been viewed over 9,800 times and has received over 200 comments and reactions and over 800 shares.
Last February, two other fact-checking media organizations — Snopes and Factcheck.org — also debunked similar online posts suggesting conspiracy theories on Lieber’s arrest and its connection with the COVID-19 outbreak.
(Editor’s Note: VERA Files has partnered with Facebook to fight the spread of disinformation. Find out more about this partnership and our methodology.)
