DISINFO: Monkeypox originated in US biolabs in Nigeria
SUMMARY
According to some experts, monkeypox began to spread from Nigeria. There are more US biological laboratories in Nigeria than initially known, and there are still a large number of questions about the nature of the activities of these laboratories.
Doctors have recently encountered hundreds of cases of monkeypox in different European countries, as well as in America and Australia, while the ways in which the infection spreads remains completely unclear to specialists.
RESPONSE
This claim implies that US biolabs around the world are behind the spread of multiple diseases and biological threats, most recently monkeypox.
This is a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative strategy. This message is a disingenuous attempt to portray international (and specifically, US) financial support for research on contagious diseases as some dark project on biological weapons.
Although US government agencies working in Nigeria - including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research Program- and their implementing partners have supported both national and state laboratories with technical assistance and funding, the United States has no control over these laboratories, as the US general consulate in Nigeria has clarified. In any case, monkeypox is a natural disease known since 1958 and relatively minor outbreaks have taken place all over the world regularly, while there is nothing to indicate that the May 2022 outbreak may have other source than a natural origin.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that US biolaboratories in Nigeria may be behind the monkeypox epidemic, the US plans to send infected migratory birds to infect Russia, that Covid-19 is one of the pathogens prepared in US biolabs for biological warfare, that US biolabs are responsible for virus outbreaks in Ukraine since 2008, or that the images of dead bodies in Bucha may be a diversion of attention from US biolabs in Ukraine.