After telling the world that it would donate masks, face guards and testing equipment to Italy, China quietly backtracked and sold the Mediterranean country desperately-needed medical equipment, according to a report.

What’s worse is that the personal protective equipment (PPE) China forced Italy to buy was actually the same PPE Italy donated to China before coronavirus rushed its own shores and killed nearly 16,000 people.

“Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population. China then has sent Italian PPE back to Italy — some of it, not even all of it … and charged them for it,” a senior Trump administration official told The Spectator.

Beijing taking advantage of Italy’s generosity and then flipping it into something more sinister is just the latest example of the country’s misdeeds amid the global outbreak.

Thousands of other supplies and testing kits China has sold to other countries at marked-up prices have turned out to be defective.

Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering they weren’t working properly. Last week, the Netherlands also rejected China-made coronavirus testing kits and protective gear, calling them substandard and questioning the quality of supplies Beijing is selling to the world.

Turkey, Georgia and the Czech Republic have also spoken out about kits it purchased from China as being less than adequate. In some cases, instead of fixing the issue, China has blamed user error.

The claims of faulty devices come as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths continue to surge around Europe and the United States, underscoring the dependence many countries have on Chinese imports.

“It’s so disingenuous for Chinese officials now to say we are the ones who are helping the Italians or we are the ones who are helping the developing world when, in fact, they are the ones who infected all of us,” the senior administration official said. “Of course they should be helping. They have a special responsibility to help because they are the ones who began the spread of the coronavirus and did not give the information required to the rest of the world to plan accordingly.”

The official said China’s decision to delay and suppress critical data has turned a bad situation worse.

On Thursday, Vice President Pence said that had China been truly transparent about COVID-19, there would be “no question” the world would have been in a better place to respond to the monster virus that has infected more than a million people and killed more than 70,000 worldwide.

“There’s simply no question that China’s lack of candor to the world impacted the way the world was able to respond,” Pence said.

In fact, as China downplayed the outbreak within its borders, nearly half a million people traveled to the United States, possibly carrying the virus with them.

“The disinformation that China has put out is crippling responses around the world,” the administration official said. “We were a month behind because the Chinese did not share information. It’s hard for the world to accept that even the information that they’re putting out now is accurate and acceptable from an epidemiological standpoint. We’re operating on some level with a hand tied behind our back.”

Since the outbreak began, China has been accused of multiple cover-ups and deliberately lying about its coronavirus infection and death rates. Beijing has tried to rebrand itself on the international stage as a leader in tackling the virus but the drumbeat of complaints has been getting louder in recent days and the faulty kits, delivered to the likes of Britain, Spain and the Netherlands, is only exacerbating the problem.

In a blog post on Monday, John Bell, the coordinator of coronavirus testing for Public Health England, said that none of England’s 17 million antibody kits — including the ones bought from China — have performed well.

“We see many false negatives and we also see false positives,” he wrote. “…This is not a good result for test suppliers or for us.”

He added that the antibody tests bought had only able to identify immunity accurately in people who had been severely ill. The antibody tests will be crucial in helping essential workers get back to work.

Ideally, the finger-prick tests would be able to confirm who had already built up immunity to COVID-19 and perhaps let them leave lockdown and return to work.

John Newton, Britain’s new testing chief, told the Times of London that the antibody tests from China were not good enough because they were only able to identify immunity accurately on people who had been severely ill.

“The test developed in China was validated against patients who were severely ill with a very large viral load, generating a large amount of antibodies . . . whereas we want to use the test in the context of a wider range of levels of infection including people who are quite mildly infected. So for our purposes, we need a test that performs better than some of these other tests.”

In response to the news that all of the kits fell short of expectations, the Prime Minister’s Office announced it would push to get a refund.

“If the tests don’t work then the orders that we placed will be canceled and wherever possible we will recover the costs,” the PMO said.

Britain is the latest place that has had issues with equipment and kits bought from Beijing.

Last week, the Netherlands joined Spain, Turkey, Georgia and the Czech Republic in their concerns over masks and test kits. The claims of faulty test kits and other devices came as the number of COVID-19 cases continued to surge in the United States and Europe.

Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering they weren’t working properly. The Netherlands also rejected China-made coronavirus testing kits and protective gear, calling them substandard and questioning the quality of supplies Beijing is selling — at marked-up prices — to the world.

“China creates the poison and sells the solution to it,” foreign affairs expert Gordon Chang told Fox News.

The Trump administration has blasted China’s authoritarian leadership for trying to conceal what it knew about COVID-19 during its earlier days when the virus it is believed could have been contained.

RFA noted that it could not independently verify that the Chinese Communist Party was burning coronavirus patients alive, nor has the Communist Party confirmed or denied the rumors. Yet the rumors persist that, to make room for new patients in Wuhan’s overcrowded hospitals, medical staff chose older patients less likely to survive the infection and shipped them to incinerators while they were still alive and conscious.

RFA quoted a source “close to the funeral industry” identified only as Ma who said that he had heard reports of “people restrained and forced into body bags when they were still moving.”

“Some people are saying that … there are video clips of screams coming from funeral homes, from inside the furnaces … which tells us that some people were taken to the funeral homes while they were still alive,” Ma added.

Ma also noted the existence of video testimony from an anonymous older woman who had been treated at a Wuhan hospital, presumably for Chinese coronavirus.

“One old lady was saying that they put one guy into … a body bag when he wasn’t even dead yet, and took him off to the crematorium because there was no way of saving him,” Ma told RFA.

Video of an older woman speaking anonymously to a camera began circulating on social media in February in which she said she witnessed a patient next to her at a Wuhan hospital stuffed into a body bag while still alive.

“He’s not dead, his feet and hands are still moving,” the woman says, “[They] wrapped him in a plastic body bag and zipped it up.”

According to New Tang Dynasty, a broadcaster affiliated with the persecuted Chinese Falun Gong movement, the woman spoke with a Wuhan accent, suggesting she was a native of the central Chinese city.

The Taiwanese outlet Taiwan News traced the origin of the video to a Chinese student group called “Youth Production,” who reportedly uploaded the video on February 24. Taiwan News noted that the woman claimed to have suffered from coronavirus symptoms but, as she was in her 60s, she did not suffer severe symptoms, unlike the man taken away, who she estimated was in his 70s.

“She said that the man was weak but was still breathing when medical workers ‘bound his head’ and then his hands and feet, which were ‘still moving,’” Taiwan News reported, noting that she also lamented that the hospital where she received care had no other treatments available for coronavirus patients besides oxygen. In the West, doctors have begun experimenting with several drug mixtures, one of which — a combination of antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat lupus and malaria — has generated optimism in American hospitals.

The woman said she felt older patients at the hospital were treated “like dead dogs.”

Neither Taiwan News nor RFA could independently confirm the reports of Wuhan residents being burned alive.

The Chinese Communist Party claims that, as of Tuesday, it has documented 82,718 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,335 deaths across the country. The vast majority of these, 3,212 deaths, were recorded in Hubei province. Wuhan is the capital of Hubei.

Multiple reports citing sources in Wuhan’s seven funeral homes dispute this claim, estimating that the real death toll in the city is as much as ten to forty times higher than China’s official nationwide death toll. Reports of hundreds of bodies cremated in some funeral homes began surfacing in February, at the height of the epidemic in the city. Government officials did not allow residents to pick up the remains of their relatives until late March, however, as the strict lockdown that saw government officials welding Wuhan residents in their homes was still ongoing.

When the funeral homes opened to distributed ashes two weekends ago, witnesses estimated that some funeral homes were distributing as many as 5,000 sets of remains a day. Estimates as to the number of sets of remains distributed last week in Wuhan range from 30,000 to 46,000 people.

“There are suspicions that many people died in their homes without being diagnosed and, at first, there were no kits to do the test,” an unnamed resident said in a report last week. “Nobody in Wuhan believes the official numbers. The real one, only they know.”

Ma, the funeral home source speaking to RFA in its report on Monday, said that Wuhan was cremating so many bodies at some point that some incinerators broke down, resulting in cremators placing multiple bodies in one incinerator at a time to keep up with the sheer amount of remains. The result has been several reported incidents of people receiving urns with ashes featuring items they do not recognize that clearly did not belong to their loved ones.

“A resident of Wuhan’s Jiang’an district surnamed Liu said she had found a man’s belt clasp in the urn she was given, supposedly containing her mother’s ashes,” RFA noted. “And a resident of Hongshan district said he had found the remains of ceramic dental crown, denture or implant in the urn labeled with his father’s name, even though his father had never had such a thing fitted.”

U.S. intelligence officials don’t think the pandemic was caused by deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The prime suspect is “natural” transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.

“Good science, bad safety” is how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) put this theory in a Feb. 16 tweet. He ranked such a breach (or natural transmission) as more likely than two extreme possibilities: an accidental leak of an “engineered bioweapon” or a “deliberate release.” Cotton’s earlier loose talk about bioweapons set off a furor, back when he first raised it in late January and called the outbreak “worse than Chernobyl.”

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added to the story last month by describing the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus,” respectively.

China dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own. On March 12, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao charged in a tweet: “It might be [the] US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” He retweeted an article that claimed, without evidence, that U.S. troops might have spread the virus when they attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

China retreated on March 22, when Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai told “Axios on HBO” that such rumors were “crazy” on both sides. A State Department spokesman said Cui’s comment was “welcome,” and Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged in a March 27 phone call to “focus on cooperative behavior,” a senior administration official told me.

To be clear: U.S. intelligence officials think there’s no evidence whatsoever that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory as a potential bioweapon. Solid scientific research demonstrates that the virus wasn’t engineered by humans and that it originated in bats.

But how did the outbreak occur? Solving this medical mystery is important to prevent future pandemics. What’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” — that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky.

Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the seafood market.

There’s a competing theory — of an accidental lab release of bat coronavirus — that scientists have been puzzling about for weeks. Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread?

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that “the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,” with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it “also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.” He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, “which provides only minimal protection,” compared with the top BSL-4.

Ebright described a December video from the Wuhan CDC that shows staffers “collecting bat coronaviruses with inadequate [personal protective equipment] and unsafe operational practices.” Separately, I reviewed two Chinese articles, from 2017 and 2019, describing the actions of Wuhan CDC researcher Tian Junhua, who while capturing bats in a cave “forgot to take protective measures” so that “bat urine dripped from the top of his head like raindrops.”

And then there’s the Chinese study that was curiously withdrawn. In February, a site called ResearchGate published a brief article by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology. “In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories,” the article concluded. Botao Xiao told the Wall Street Journal in February that he had withdrawn the paper because it “was not supported by direct proofs.”

Beijing says it’s slowly beginning to emerge from the crisis that originated on its soil, while putting its propaganda machine to work to craft a favorable narrative. Weeks after announcing the outbreak, some governments — particularly the United States — are accusing China of purposely failing to inform the public, thereby exacerbating the crisis.

A Chinese doctor who has since died of the virus tried sounding alarms during its early stages. Li Wenliang — who worked in a Wuhan hospital and has since been hailed as a hero — was detained with eight other doctors for posting information about patients with respiratory problems on WeChat, a Chinese messaging platform.

Authorities claimed the doctors were spreading “unverified information” as reason for their detention. Other doctors were reprimanded and told to stop posting online about the virus. Li was released after signing a document admitting he committed “illegal acts.”

He eventually contracted the virus and died in February.

“If society had at the time believed those ‘rumors,’ and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today,” the Supreme People’s Court said of Li’s detention. “Rumors end when there is openness.”

SARS

Accusations of covering up unfavorable news to protect its image are nothing new to the Chinese Communist Party, which has a penchant for secrecy that has hampered containment efforts in the past.

When the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic broke out in the country in late 2002, the Chinese government was accused of failing to take action for several months. The virus was believed to have originated from wet markets of the Guangdong province before spreading to major cities.

It took the government four or five months to disclose the outbreak, which claimed the lives of more than 770 people in 30 countries.

Tainted milk

Chinese authorities reportedly ordered Sanlu Group Co, the maker of infant formula that was embroiled in a string of recalls after its tainted milk powder was linked to kidney stones in infants and at least four deaths, to cover up the scandal for fear of igniting social unrest.

Parents who tried warning of the poisoned milk were thwarted by an unresponsive bureaucracy, according to the New York Times, and journalists who heard about the sick children were blocked from covering the story during the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

A massive outcry stemmed from how the public remained uninformed for months as parents gave their children tainted formula. Many of the corporations involved were blamed, but so were government officials who were criticized for the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to maintain control rather than fix a broken regulatory system.

In all, more than 300,000 babies became sick. Sanlu’s chairwoman was given a life sentence for doing nothing to stop the sale and production of the milk after learning it was dangerous. Several other executives were also jailed and a dairy farmer and milk supplier were executed.

Tiananmen Square massacre

China’s need to control information also extends to well-known events. In 1989, 1 million pro-democracy protesters gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to force the government to move away from decades of one-party rule.

Weeks later, Chinese troops entered the square and opened fire on the unarmed protesters. Hundreds, if not thousands, are believed to have died, but no official death toll was ever made public.

China has since censored the incident through draconian Internet restrictions and the elimination of any reference to the massacre.

Great famine

China’s Great Famine claimed tens of millions of lives as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward transitioned the country into a communist society amid rapid industrialization in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Britain.

From 1958-61, Mao pushed harsh harvest quotas with primitive Soviet farming techniques.

Combined with the persecution of farmers who failed to produce enough food, the country descended into a dark period where hunger impacted millions. Discussions of some Mao-era policies that revive national traumas have been banned in China in an effort to whitewash its history.

To talk about the famine at the time was deemed counterrevolutionary and subject to punishment from the state, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Yang Jisheng, a journalist who wrote a 1,200-page account of the famine, was banned from leaving China in 2016 to travel to the U.S. to accept a Harvard University prize for his work.

His 2008 book, “Tombstone,” is also banned in China.

The unidentified victim from Yunnan province died while on a chartered bus heading to his workplace in Shandong province, the state-run Global Times announced in a tweet Monday.

“He was tested positive for #hantavirus. Other 32 people on bus were tested,” the outlet stated, offering no further details.

The suggestion of a new virus starting just as China starts lifting its strict quarantines from COVID-19, which originated in the Asian nation, sparked panic among many on social media, with #hantavirus trending.

However, experts were quick to point out that it is not a new virus — and has only rarely thought to have been passed between humans.

“The #Hantavirus first emerged in 1950s in the American-Korean war in Korea (Hantan river). It spreads from rat/mice if humans ingest their body fluids. Human-human transmission is rare,” Swedish scientist Dr. Sumaiya Shaikh tweeted.

“Please do not panic, unless you plan to eat rats,” she stressed.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said hantavirus is rare — but put the death rate at 38 percent.

Symptoms may occur up to eight weeks “after exposure to fresh urine, droppings, or saliva of infected rodents,” the CDC says, noting it can occasionally also come from bites from infected rats or mice.

The symptoms in many ways mirror those reported from the novel coronavirus — with sufferers reporting fevers, headaches, coughing and shortness of breath.

One patient likened it to “a tight band around my chest and a pillow over my face,” the CDC said.

That is almost identical to what those with COVID-19 have reported, with Rep. Ben McAdams recently saying he “felt like I had a belt around my chest.”

Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome became a “nationally notifiable disease” in the US in 1995, but there have been no known cases transmitted between people, the health group says.

“In Chile and Argentina, rare cases of person-to-person transmission have occurred” in the case of one strand named Andes virus, the CDC says.

“There is no specific treatment, cure, or vaccine for hantavirus infection,” the CDC warned, saying patients often need intensive care to “help them through the period of severe respiratory distress.”

China and Russia continue to use the global coronavirus crisis to spread false reports and other online disinformation, according to the latest update published Wednesday from the European External Action Service’s team dedicated to highlighting such digital tactics.

The group, called East Stratcom and whose mandate includes debunking fake news originating from Russia, said there had been more than 150 cases of pro-Kremlin disinformation linked to the global health crisis since late January. That includes claims that the European Union was on the verge of collapse because of national governments’ fumbled responses to COVID-19.

Across social media, these narratives, often promoted by Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik, have also highlighted how the Kremlin has been better prepared than its Western counterparts, and how some EU governments welcomed aid provided by both Moscow and Beijing.

So far, these messages have yet to break through to a wider audience, mostly staying within Russian- and Chinese-friendly audiences online, particularly in countries like Italy, Spain and Greece.

But as the global crisis grows at pace, such efforts — both from state-backed groups and domestic EU actors — are linking the coronavirus pandemic with existing misinformation themes, including the targeting of migrants, minority groups and the long-term credibility of the EU, according to the authors of the update.

“In the EU and elsewhere, coordinated disinformation messaging seeks to frame vulnerable minorities as the cause of the pandemic and to fuel distrust in the ability of democratic institutions to deliver effective responses,” the officials wrote in their analysis. “Some state and state-backed actors seek to exploit the public health crisis to advance geopolitical interests, often by directly challenging the credibility of the European Union and its partners.”

Both Russia and China have rejected accusations that they have spread false reports and disinformation online.

In response to the public health crisis, EU officials and executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter have tried to clamp down on the worst offenders, with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, urging both tech companies and the public to do more to stop the spread of disinformation online.

Confronted with demands for action, social media giants have beefed up their response to the crisis, including promoting official advice, removing harmful material and using artificial intelligence tools to track false reports. Still, many policymakers remain unsatisfied, and misinformation remains rife on these digital platforms.

“Those spreading disinformation harm you,” von der Leyen said in an online video statement on Tuesday. “Disinformation can cost lives.”

In recent weeks, China and Russian had attempted to undermine Europe’s response to the crisis, according to the analysis. That included promoting messages, both within the 27-country bloc, as well as the Western Balkans, North America and elsewhere, that the EU was not tackling the pandemic, that it was betraying its core values in the region’s response and that Moscow and Beijing were the only ones providing a robust strategy to combat COVID-19.

Yet despite these state-backed initiatives, most online falsehoods about the coronavirus still originate from average EU citizens looking for advice, guidance and support from others on social media, according to several independent disinformation experts who were not connected to the EU’s latest analysis.

The biologist told the agents that a colleague in China had asked him to deliver the vials to a researcher at a U.S. institute. After examining the vials, however, customs agents came to an alarming conclusion.

“Inspection of the writing on the vials and the stated recipient led inspection personnel to believe the materials contained within the vials may be viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials,” says an unclassified FBI tactical intelligence report obtained by Yahoo News.

The report, written by the Chemical and Biological Intelligence Unit of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD), does not give the name of the Chinese scientist carrying the suspected SARS and MERS samples, or the intended recipient in the U.S. But the FBI concluded that the incident, and two other cases cited in the report, were part of an alarming pattern.

“The Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate assesses foreign scientific researchers who transport undeclared and undocumented biological materials into the United States in their personal carry-on and/or checked luggage almost certainly present a US biosecurity risk,” reads the report. “The WMDD makes this assessment with high confidence based on liaison reporting with direct access.”

The report, which came out more than two months before the World Health Organization learned of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan that turned out to be COVID-19, appears to be part of a larger FBI concern about China’s involvement with scientific research in the U.S. While the report refers broadly to foreign researchers, all three cases cited involve Chinese nationals.

In the case of the suspected SARS and MERS vials, the intelligence report cites another classified document that is marked “FISA,” meaning it contains information collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Another case cited in the report appeared to involve flu strains, and a third was suspected E. coli.

The FBI does not state precisely what sort of biosecurity risk these cases could present, but Raina MacIntyre, a professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said the FBI appears to be concerned with dual-use research that would be used for bioterrorism. And if the illicit samples cited in the report were being brought into the U.S., she says, the traffic is likely to be both ways.

“How do you know what they’re bringing in and out unless you have a comprehensive surveillance point?” she asked. “If it’s going one way, it’s going the other way. You’d be very naive to assume otherwise.”

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, who worked on China issues on the National Security Council under the Trump administration, said “there is a threat” posed by Chinese nationals carrying biological samples but believes it’s “likely the carrier … would be someone who is unwitting,” making it hard to determine the intent. “Some likely could be deliberate, to test our ability to identify and intercept. Others could be opportunistic,” he said.

The FBI report refers to both biosecurity, which typically refers to the intentional misuse of pathogens, such as for bioterrorism, and biosafety, which covers accidental release. The FBI declined to comment on the report.

Concerns about Chinese biosafety are not new. For example, the SARS outbreak in 2003 was followed by several incidents of infections caused by laboratory accidents, including eight cases that resulted from mishandling at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing.

“There have been cases in the past where a variant of some kind of flu pandemic had escaped from a laboratory because of mismanagement,” said Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

But the problem is not limited to Chinese researchers, even if those cases have been prominent, she continued. “Certainly it is a biosecurity risk when anyone is transporting materials in a manner that is clandestine because … there have been several incidents when this has occurred with researchers of a variety of nationalities.”

Concerns about China’s flouting of biosafety precautions may be long-standing, but the coronavirus pandemic is likely to exacerbate tensions between Beijing and Washington. The outbreak comes amid already rising tensions in U.S.-China relations over issues that range from trade to espionage.

Andrew Weber, who worked during the Obama administration as the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, said the relationship with China in the biological sciences has gotten worse in recent years.

“After SARS, when China needed technical help, it had a strong relationship with the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. They were transparent, because they realized covering up an outbreak cost them dearly,” said Weber, now a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks. “In recent years they’ve tightened up, making international cooperation more difficult.”

In recent weeks, however, these tensions have rapidly boiled over, with President Trump calling COVID-19 “the Chinese Virus,” while Beijing in turn has promoted conspiracy theories claiming the virus originated in a U.S. weapons lab.

Scientists have been adamant that the virus is not a weapon, either from the United States or China. “There’s no basis to suspect it’s a laboratory construct,” says Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University. “It has none of the expected signatures that would be present for deliberate construction.”

However, Ebright doesn’t exclude the possibility that the virus’s spread started from poor biosecurity in China. A leading theory is that the virus jumped from wildlife to humans. Some researchers speculate this happened at a live-animal market where exotic species are sold for food. But Ebright also notes that such wildlife viruses are collected in laboratories, including in Wuhan. “Therefore, it’s also a possibility that this virus entered the human population through accidental infection of a lab worker carrying out field collection, or an accident by a lab worker characterizing the sample in a laboratory,” he said.

Independent of the coronavirus, the FBI’s focus on China’s biosecurity appears to be part of long-standing suspicion in the U.S. government about China’s involvement in the biological sciences. Several recent high-profile Justice Department cases involving the export of sensitive technology have involved Chinese scientists, or persons with alleged ties to the Chinese government.

Most prominently, the Justice Department in January announced charges against Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, for concealing ties to the Chinese government. “It’s a clear-cut case of a conflict of interest, and unfortunately, it’s not an isolated incident,” said FBI special agent Joseph R. Bonavolonta, head of the Boston field office, in announcing the charges.

Lieber, who is free on a $1 million bond, has not yet entered a plea on the charges.

But the FBI’s focus on China and Chinese scientists is also raising concerns among some academics, who fear it smacks of profiling. “I am concerned that the current trend in national security is toward profiling against people of Chinese descent,” said Nicholas Evans, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who specializes in medical ethics. “That’s not only racist, it’s bad practice. FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement attempts at profiling have very often been harmful without making us any safer.”

Evans also questioned the FBI’s focus on scientists hand-carrying biological samples as a unique threat. He pointed to previous examples, like a U.S. lab in Maine that was fined more than a decade ago for importing highly pathogenic avian flu viruses from Saudi Arabia.

“The FBI claims that it is impossible to determine the contents of samples accurately, even if declared under current import laws,” he wrote in an email. “That’s true. But I am skeptical about the degree to which this particular behavior adds significant risks to security given that there are many other ways to get biological organisms into the country.”

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it’s true that China has long had loopholes in its biosafety regulations. “That’s why [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] in February talked about beefing up the legislation for biosafety and biosecurity,” he said.

That history has already encouraged rumors like the idea that the coronavirus originated as a bioweapon.

Now, with relations between China and the U.S. deteriorating, Huang expects collaboration on biological research to grow even more difficult, reversing decades of cooperation. “I often argue that U.S. engagement with China is the most successful in the area of public health,” he said. Such cooperation even survived the difficult period after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Now, however, those relations are being set back as hostilities between the two countries grow.

“You could argue, health is borderless, especially when two countries face these common challenges. This would be a time for them to collaborate mostly closely,” he said. “That turned out to not be the case.”

The seven funeral homes serving Wuhan have reportedly been running nonstop recently, prompting one resident to say “anyone with any ability to think” knows officials are lying about the death toll.

China announced 2,535 deaths in Wuhan – the initial epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic – which was locked down for two months.

But some locals believe the number is closer to 50,000.

News website Caixin.com reported that 5,000 urns had been delivered by a supplier to the Hankou Funeral Home in just one day.

“It can’t be right … because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” a Wuhan resident surnamed Zhang told Radio Free Asia.

A resident surnamed Gao said the city’s seven crematoriums should have a capacity of around 2,000 bodies a day if they work around the clock.“Anyone looking at that figure will realise, anyone with any ability to think,” Gao said. “What are they talking about [2,535] people?”

“Seven crematoriums could get through more than that [in a single day].”

Some people estimate 46,800 COVID-19 victims will have been cremated, based on the capacity of the funeral homes.

Buying silence

Residents say city officials have been buying their silence with 3,000 yuan ($685) cash handouts in “funeral allowances” to make sure cremations are completed by the grave-tending festival of Qing Ming on April 5.

“It’s to stop them keening [a traditional expression of grief]; nobody’s allowed to keen after Qing Ming has passed,” Wuhan local Chen Yaohui said.

Another resident, Hu Aizhen, lost his mother to COVID-19 and said nobody in the city believes the official death toll.

“The official number of deaths was 2,500 people … but before the epidemic began, the city’s crematoriums typically cremated around 220 people a day,” Aizhen said.

“But during the epidemic, they transferred cremation workers from around China to Wuhan keep cremating bodies around the clock.”

Stamping out second wave

Mainland China has reported a drop in new coronavirus cases for the fourth consecutive day as Beijing seeks to stamp out the risk of a second wave of infections by shutting its borders to foreign travellers and cutting international flights.

The National Health Commission said on Monday that 31 new coronavirus cases were recorded on Sunday, including one locally transmitted infection, dropping from 45 cases a day earlier.

Four new deaths were reported, taking the cumulative, reported death toll in the mainland to 3304, from 81,470 infections.

The number of new infections has fallen sharply in the mainland from the peak in February.

Reopen for business

The government is now exhorting businesses and factories to reopen for business as it rolls out various stimulus to drive a recovery from what many now expect to be an outright economic contraction in January-March.

Chinese President Xi Jinping said the government would adjust support policies for small and medium-sized firms promptly as the situation developed to protect them from the impact of the coronavirus.

Chinese firms should actively resume operations and production even as coronavirus prevention efforts continue, Xi also said during a Sunday visit to Ningbo, a major port city in eastern Zhejiang province, according to state media.

No new Hubei cases

Hubei province, where the coronavirus outbreak first emerged in late 2019, “reported” no new cases for the sixth consecutive day on Sunday after the province of 60 million people lifted its traffic restrictions and resumed some domestic flights.

Beijing remains worried about the risk of a second wave of the epidemic triggered by cases involving travellers coming to China who were infected overseas.

The virus has now spread globally, infecting hundreds of thousands outside China’s borders.

China has barred foreigners from entering the country and ordered airlines to slash the number of international flights into the country.

The vast majority of the so-called imported cases reported to date have been Chinese nationals, many of whom are students.

Canadian physician Dr. Bruce Aylward, an aide to WHO director-general Dr.Tedros Adhanom, sat down for a video interview with RTHK about the coronavirus outbreak where he was asked whether the organization would “consider Taiwan’s membership.”

For several seconds, Aylward sat in silence.

“Hello?” the reporter asked.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear your question Yvonne,” Aylward responded.

“Okay, let me repeat the question,” she said.

“No, that’s okay. Let’s move to another one then,” the WHO official told her.

The reporter doubled down, saying she was “curious” to talk about Taiwan as well as the ongoing pandemic, but Aylward quickly hangs up.

After calling him again, the reporter asked about what his thoughts were to Taiwan’s response to the outbreak.

“Well, we’ve already talked about China,” Aylward answered. “And you know, when you look across all the different areas of China, they’ve actually all done quite a good job.”

Critics slammed Aylward and WHO for what they suggested was the global organization kowtowing to China.

“Aylward’s behavior reminds us that either we remove #China’s pernicious influence in multilateral institutions like the #WorldHealthOrganization or the world’s free states defund them and start over,” author Gordon Chang reacted.

It is an embarrassing scene, journalist Ezra Cheung said. “Ironically, despite being so close to China, Taiwan manages to keep the #coronavirus infection and fatality rate low.”

“This is really stunning. Beijing’s power over the speech of a Canadian WHO official,” Axios reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian tweeted.

“When exactly did the WHO become a front for Chinese propaganda?” Grabien media company founder/editor Tom Elliott asked.

WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.