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| - Fact Check: Japanese Nobel laureate never said China manufactured coronavirus
The viral post claims that as per Honjo, if coronavirus was natural, it would not have affected the whole world.
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India Today Fact Check
Dr. Honjo refuted the viral message as "false accusation" and "misinformation". He neither said China manufactured coronavirus nor did he work in any lab in Wuhan.
Did Japanese Nobel laureate in medicine Dr. Tasuku Honjo say coronavirus is not natural or come from bats, but was manufactured by China? A viral message on social media says so, and goes on to add in Honjo's "own words" that he worked at the same Wuhan lab which allegedly produced the virus, and all the lab technicians are now presumed dead.
The post, viral on WhatsApp and Facebook, also has a link to the Wikipedia page of Honjo, a professor at Japan's Kyoto University for 36 years.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim to be false. Neither did Honjo say that China manufactured coronavirus, nor did he ever work in any lab in Wuhan in his illustrious career.
The post has been widely shared on Facebook.
The viral claim
The viral post claims that as per Honjo, if coronavirus was natural, it would not have affected the whole world.
"Because, depending on the nature, the temperature is different in different countries. if it were natural, it would only have affected countries with the same temperature as China. instead, it spreads to a country like Switzerland, the same way it spreads to desert areas," reads a part of the viral post, purportedly claimed by Honjo.
As per the post, Honjo claimed that he had worked for four years in the Wuhan laboratory in China. But when he called up the staff of the laboratory, he found their phones were dead for the last three months.
"It is now understood that all of these laboratory technicians are dead. Based on all of my knowledge and research to date, I can say this with 100% confidence that Corona is not natural. It did not come from bats. China made it," the post attributed the words to the Nobel laureate.
Dr. Honjo refutes
Dr. Tasuku Honjo is Deputy Director-General and Distinguished Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University, Japan. Along with American scientist James Allison, he had won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for game-changing discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer.
Soon after the post went viral, Kyoto University published a statement by Dr. Honjo on its website. Dr. Honjo has refuted the viral claim, terming it "false accusations and misinformation".
In his statement, the professor said, "At this stage, when all of our energies are needed to treat the ill, prevent the further spread of sorrow, and plan for a new beginning, the broadcasting of unsubstantiated claims regarding the origins of the disease is dangerously distracting."
What did Dr. Honjo say about China?
On April 10, in an interview published in Japanese media outlet "Nikkei Asian Review", Dr Honjo had said that coronavirus originated from China.
Replying to a question about how the world would look like post-coronavirus, the professor had said, "The illness originated in China, but the country will be the first to recover from it too. I can't say whether this will boost Chinese influence or whether the world will shun China, but there's a possibility the global order shifts over the outbreak."
We could not find any evidence anywhere which confirms that Dr. Honjo has ever said China manufactured coronavirus.
Dr. Honjo's Wuhan link?
As per Dr. Honjo's biography published in the Kyoto University website, he has never worked in any Wuhan laboratory. He has been associated with Kyoto University since 1984. According to his profile, he has worked only in the United States and Japan in his entire academic career.
Therefore, the claim that Dr. Honjo has worked for four years in China's Wuhan laboratory is also false. Neither did he ever say that coronavirus was manufactured by China.
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