US arrests the man who created COVID-19.
The post claims that Prof Charles Lieber of Harvard University was arrested by US federal agents on April 4, 2020, for manufacturing and selling coronavirus to China., The virus that causes COVID-19 originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The disease was declared a global pandemic by the WHO on March 11, and has led to over 69,000 deaths from 1.2 million confirmed infections globally as of April 6. The US has recorded 337,646 cases and 9,653 deaths thus far., On January 28, the US Department of Justice announced charges against Lieber, a professor at Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and two other co-accused, who are Chinese nationals, for lying to the American Authorities about his involvement with a Chinese government program and failing to disclose payments that he had received from Chinese funders., A statement from the Department of Justice indicates that Lieber had been arrested for lying to both the US Department of Defence and the National Institute of Health about his affiliation with Wuhan University of Technology, as well as his involvement with China’s Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed to recruit and cultivate scientific talent for the Chinese government., The US authorities also accused Prof Lieber of failing to disclose payments that he received from the Chinese government, including more than $1.5 million to set up a lab at the Wuhan University of Technology and a salary of up to $50,000 per month for his work with the Chinese university., PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook post claiming that the arrest of Havard scientist Prof Lieber is connected to COVID-19 and finds it to be FALSE., This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms., By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds., Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content., This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Fact-Checker James Okong’o and edited by PesaCheck News Editor Enock Nyariki., The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck Managing Editor Eric Mugendi., PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org., PesaCheck is a joint initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with additional funding support from the International Budget Partnership (Kenya) and Twaweza, in partnership with a coalition of local media organisations, and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ)., Written by, Written by
FALSE: The arrest of Harvard scientist Prof Charles Lieber is not linked to COVID-19