The buzz among social-media users in China comes from an article published by the state-linked Global Times titled “Research verifies that COVID was manufactured by an American company.”

A thread discussing the Global Times article has garnered at least 1.67 billion views on the Chinese platform Weibo.

A topic thread on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform discussing the article went viral early on Wednesday. At the moment, the thread has been viewed 1.67 billion times and spawned 292,000 comment threads.

The Global Times article, which was republished by 45 other Chinese outlets alleged that Global Times is “one step closer to the truth” in their investigations to uncover the corona virus’ origins. The article also claimed the Russian army had “found a lot of evidence in Ukraine” of US-linked laboratories producing biological weapons.

The coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.