Leaked documents from Russia exposed a pact between the two countries to spread propaganda.

Russian authorities initially promoted false propaganda. And when Russia had invaded Ukraine, a spokesperson from their defense ministry revived long-debunked claims that the US had been financing a bioweapons program in the area, alleging that Ukrainian laboratories had been conducting tests with bat coronaviruses to propagate the most lethal diseases secretly.

The technique of delivering false information was an age-old craft of the Russian government. Nevertheless, in the current situation, Russia found assistance from the Chinese. Within a brief period, Chinese officials and media outlets began to fabricate and repeat the story of biolabs. 

“China jumped on the biolabs conspiracy theory,” said Katja Drinhausen, an analyst with the Mercator Institute of China Studies in Berlin. Chinese officials and media outlets had spent the preceding months pushing the notion that the pandemic might have originated in a lab accident outside China.