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In April 2020, as the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic continued to take its grim toll in countries around the world, a meme circulated on social media held that U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had undertaken a trip to Wuhan, China -- the apparent origin place of the coronavirus outbreak -- just a month before the initial cluster of COVID-19 cases was reported to the World Health Organization: The meme suggested (that is to say, overtly stated) that Pelosi was engaged in traitorous activity in China related to this virus release. However, Pelosi's House website and social media accounts neither display, nor have been scrubbed of, any mention or documentation of her having traveled to Wuhan (or anywhere else in China) during that timeframe. The Foreign Travel Reports lodged with the House Clerk don't record Pelosi's making a trip to China during the fourth quarter of 2019. (She accompanied a Congressional delegation to Jordan, Afghanistan, and Qatar in mid-October 2019). And no contemporaneous news accounts in either the U.S. or China reported Pelosi's having been in latter country in November 2019. As well, the accompanying photograph used in the meme does not show Pelosi visiting Wuhan or meeting with Chinese officials at any time in 2019. It dates from November 2015, four full years before the COVID-19 outbreak, and pictures Pelosi (who was then the House Minority Leader) meeting with now-retired Chinese politician Zhang Dejiang as the head of a Congressional delegation to Beijing. Xinhua, China's state-run press agency, described that meeting as follows:
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