DISINFO: Some in the US want to prevent China from explaining its efforts to deliver aid against Covid-19

This is a deliberate distortion of the words of former US Secretary of State and Hoover Institution Fellow, Condoleezza Rice, who actually said, in an online interview with the site RealClear Politics: “[Chinese authorities] are going to try to shift the narrative from their initial responsibility for not fessing up to what was happening, to we got on top of it and this is how we helped the world. That's how they're going to shift the narrative. Don't let it happen”. As it is clear from the original interview, she wasn’t referring to obscuring China’s aid deliveries, as claimed, but to hiding China’s alleged initial mistakes in handling the pandemic and concealing its severity. Allegations that the Bush Administration was planning a war with China for 2015 are conspiratorial thinking not backed up with any evidence. On the contrary, Sino-US relations experienced a sustained period of unprecedented stability during George W. Bush's presidency (2000-2008), leading to increasing economic and international cooperation. In 2001, President Bush signed a proclamation granting China permanent normal trading relations (PNTR status) with the United States. There is no reason to think that the US may have been secretly preparing for an armed conflict with Beijing. This is part of Russia’s disinformation campaign on coronavirus, specifically about US and China’s role in it. This campaign has been well documented by both media and governments, and some of its elements were widely reported by Russian and international publications and by the European External Action Service. The EUvsDisinfo database has a long set of Kremlin-linked disinformation cases on this subject, such as claims that Bill Gates and George Soros are sponsoring the Wuhan coronavirus, that it is a UK, US or NATO creation and Americans have its cure, that it is an artificial disease which specifically targets Chinese DNA, that it is a pretext to gain control of the world’s population, that it was created with economic goals while big pharma companies are spreading panic for their own profits, that it is a biological weapon against Russia and China, that it will wipe out Ukraine’s population in a few days or that it was predicted by Nostradamus and others. This disinformation message appeared in the same article as claims that “Former members of the Bush Administration created an anti-communist group called Red Dawn to advise president Trump against China” and that “Coronavirus may be the latest steps in NATO’s containment strategy against China”.