A new investigation by two media outlets — Pro Publica and Vanity Fair — has uncovered “an acute safety emergency” that occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the fall of 2019.
The 10,000-word report quotes extensively from the Wuhan lab archives and illuminates the real reason the Chinese were playing around with bat coronaviruses.
The Chinese Communist government was putting enormous pressure on the scientists and researchers at the Bio-Safety-Level 4 Wuhan lab to produce scientific breakthroughs — something the party could show to the hated West that would knock their socks off.
Former State Department analyst and member of the House committee staff doing the deep dive into the Wuhan lab archive Toy Reid identified some of the pieces that were a part of the origins puzzle for COVID-19.
As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”
And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.
…once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.
National Review‘s Jim Geraghty has been following the saga of the lab leak theory since the start.
“Oh, a warning that these viruses ‘come without a shadow and leave without a trace’ in November 2019, you say? Hey, did anything unusual happen in Wuhan, China, in the following weeks?”
What happened was that the first cases of COVID-19 were identified as coming from the Wuhan wet market. Not a smoking gun but another chink in the Chinese cover story.
We’ve known for years that the Wuhan lab complex has had numerous safety problems. But we had no idea the extent of the danger, the incompetence, and the stupidity shown by lab personnel almost on a daily basis. This was made clear from a meeting on Nov. 21, 2019, with the Wuhan staff and the “technology safety and security director for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the sprawling state agency that oversees more than 100 research institutions in China”
But the meeting, chronicled in a one and a half page summary uploaded to the WIV website on Nov. 21, was no pro forma seminar. According to Reid, it appears to have been “out of the ordinary and event driven,” and distinct from the annual safety training, which had been held in April.
For Reid, the import of Ji’s opening remarks practically leapt off the page. Ji told the assembled group that he had come bearing “important oral remarks and written instructions” from General Secretary Xi Jinping and China’s premier, Li Keqiang, to address a “complex and grave situation.”
Remember, these documents are created to put the best possible light on whatever the situation is. Calling what happened a “complex and grave situation” in the context of the remarks from President Xi can only mean something nearly catastrophic happened that would necessitate the direct involvement of Xi.
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit from the report is something Geraghty found intriguing. Within just a couple of months of the first outbreak, a Chinese bio-researcher filed a patent for a coronavirus vaccine.
Separately, ProPublica and Vanity Fair question how Yusen Zhou could have applied for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine on February 24, 2020. Yusen Zhou is the director of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, in Beijing. The top experts in vaccine development conclude that it is impossible to start from scratch and have a vaccine ready in three months. A South China Morning News report said that the Chinese government traced the first case of Covid-19 back to November 17, but other reports said that Chinese doctors only came to realize that they were dealing with a new and serious virus in late December; the first public statement about a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause” from Chinese health authorities was dated to December 21, 2019. Yet the evidence suggests that the Chinese military and medical authorities would’ve had to have started the research on their vaccine before the first cases emerged:
As I said: interesting.
There are still plenty of non-Chinese scientists who believe there is a zoological origin for the virus. They make their case based on DNA and the preponderance of the evidence that still points to a naturally occurring virus.
But after this report, the scales will tilt a little bit more toward the theory that a leak from the Wuhan lab led directly to the pandemic.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member