This is all over Twitter and some people believed it. I use the past tense because I would doubt if anyone believes it now. Was it ever believable? Apparently yes.
Even Lord Sugar in the UK asked if it was a joke. He shared the fake news on social media that 500 lions had been unleashed on Russia’s streets to force compliance to lockdown in the coronavirus pandemic. Lord Sugar’s tweet asked if it was a wind up.
What can you say about it? There is a lot of fake news on social media about coronavirus from Covid-19 cures to conspiracy theories. Some of the fake news emanates from China’s officials.
Fake News that Nobel Prize winning Professor claims virus is man-made
Another apparently fake news story is that a Nobel Prize winner, Professor Tasuku Honjo, said that the coronavirus was man-made and therefore comes from the Wuhan bio lab and not the wet market. He denies it and is ‘greatly saddened’ that the false rumour has spread on social media. Here is his statement:
We all have to be vigilante about fake news. The Honjo story looked genuine partly because there is a lot of talk about Covid-19 escaping from the biolab in Wuhan. There a lot of people who believe that the source of the virus is this biolab and some people even believe that it was released deliberately in China.
True coronavirus news!
In another bit of coronavirus news (this time it is genuine), Dr. Jane Sykes the Chief Veterinary Medical Officer of the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital said that dogs and cats would be a dead-end hosts of the virus:
It’s probably likely that dogs and cats are what we call ‘dead-end hosts’. That they don’t continue to transmit onwards, but we don’t know for sure at this point in time.
It is nice that the true news is good news.
