Secret factories hoax

NOTE: This post is a DELIBERATE HOAX, created to show how hoaxmongers do it - including legitimate journalists.

See the following features
1. Headline has nothing to do with the content
2. Fake informant. "Sources close to". 
3. Scare terms - "intercepted" "bioengineering", "human remains" "centre of infection". "secret".  
4. Real material from company website, highlighting scare terms like "long skinny swab", "viral transport", "engineered", "COVID swabs", stock market rises, opening of China branch
5. Innuendo of connection of company activity with unrelated and fictional events - first COVID case, sinking of cruise ship, global spread of virus, payoffs and high-level cover up.
6. "Denies connection": weak attempt to suggest there is a connection, avoiding any actionable direct accusation of company  
7. Fake picture of mob boss. 

This piece might make a good plot for a James Bond movie, but is entirely fiction, maligning a harmless company working hard to make things better. 

 Secret factories ‘manufactured and shipped’ coronavirus

China-Italy crime link

Swab factory, Lombardy

19 April. Brescia Pandemicia, investigative reporter.

In secret locations in China and Italy, shadowy figures met to decide the fate of the world. “For the Chinese, it’s about global domination”, a source close to the Pentagon said today, “but for the Mob, it’s always money.”

“We intercepted encoded Chinese transmissions in Wuhan all through November. We knew they were bioengineering something and testing on the local population, but we couldn’t work out the Lombardy connection or how they were going to get it out to the world. Then we found Copan.”

Copan Innovations, Shanghai 2011

“It’s easy enough. They were always going to stop Chinese at the border once the epidemic started but Italians, cultural tourists and cruise ships full of grannies? Lombardy is a prime tourist destination. And then there’s the swabs.” 

Copan Diagnostics in Lombardy is the world’s largest manufacturer of culture swabs, essential in the manufacture of testing kits. The swabs, engineered to meet CDC specifications, must be long and skinny enough to get to the nasopharynx, the upper part of the throat behind the nose. Then they are placed in transportable vials full of a solution known as "viral transport media". 

On January 20 - the day the first COVID case was found in the USA - 4.5 tonnes of COVID swabs were landed in Norfolk Virginia at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, a centre of infection. Over the next month, the Copan stock price rose by a factor of 18, while the rest of the stock market collapsed.

“There’s now an exploding need for swabs, it has shaped up as the biggest bottleneck of all. We can make a million a week. We are working 24/7 in a tremendous effort to produce our CDC-recommended and patent-protected FLOQswabs, and we’re asking customers and distributors to ration orders to maximize output”, said Copan spokesperson Gabriela Franco .

“Our 660 dedicated members of staff, many of whom are women, have stepped up without hesitation from five working days and two shifts to seven working days and night shifts also," said Copan CEO Stefania Triva.

'World's most secretive businessman' Lombardo

The Italian government has allowed the business to continue production throughout the lockdown.  The ‘Family' company Copan denies any involvement in the Lombardy COVID-19 outbreak, the worst in the world. 

Financial ties with Cayman shelf companies owned by secretive cruise ship operator Luigi Lombardo have been denied. 

High-ranking figures in the US Administration and CDC were also told to look the other way. “It’s just been too dangerous to report it,” said the anonymous Pentagon whistleblower. “People well above us are involved.”

An attempt to float a similar scheme using SARS-1 sank when operatives scuttled the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia off Tuscany in 2012. Human remains were still being found eighteen months later.

Cruise ship Costa Concordia 2012