Starting in Wuhan in December, the coronavirus outbreak has spread across China, infecting around 64,000 people and worrying the rest of the world. Fueling the panic, media have been printing alarmist scare stories and politicians peddling false information.

One prominent example of this is Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who claimed that the virus was actually developed by the Chinese government. Wuhan, he stated, "has China's only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus." He also claimed that the outbreak is "worse than Chernobyl," referring to the 1986 nuclear meltdown in Ukraine. "The Wuhan coronavirus is a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl for China, only Chernobyl was localized.