China now blames India for COVID-19

China has engaged in misinformation about the origin of the coronavirus, first blaming the United States, and then pointing to Italy as the virus' origin.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences stated in a paper: "The statistical analysis of the SARS-CoV-2’s strain diversity in different countries/regions shows that the Indian subcontinent has the highest strain diversity."

"Furthermore, based on the SARS-CoV-2’s mutation rate, we estimate that the earliest SARS-CoV-2 transmission in human hosts could be traced back to July or August of 2019. Both the least mutated strain’s geographic information and the strain diversity suggest that the Indian subcontinent might be the place where the earliest human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurred, which was three or four months prior to the Wuhan outbreak," they continued.

The paper goes on to talk about a water crisis in India and Pakistan in the summer of 2019, claiming that the shortage of water was bound to increase interactions between humans, primates and other animals.

According to the Daily Mail, world health experts have already stepped forward to refute the dubious claim. "Very flawed" were the words used to describe the Chinese "research" by David Robertson, a University of Glasgow’s Center for Virus Research professor.

"The author’s approach of identifying the ‘least mutated’ virus sequences is … inherently biased. The authors have also ignored the extensive epidemiological data available that shows clear emergence in China and that the virus spread from there. This paper adds nothing to our understanding of SARS-CoV-2," he said.