Looking for Answers to COVID Derivation in China

"The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory."

U.S. Diplomatic cable

"It's a fabulous piece of virology by the Chinese group and it's very impressive, but they haven't been thinking clearly about what they are doing."

"It's very worrying."

Simon Wain-Hobson, virologist, Paris Pasteur Institute

"[The Chinese government was responsible for the most] ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history."

"The deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat [is beyond praiseworthy]."

World Health Organization report

"So it was apparent [that the investigation was marred by clear political tension]  and there were people from foreign affairs in China attending our meetings and so on."

"It was at times tense, but always very well mannered and good humoured."

"The group [WHO investigators] wasn't designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practise in Wuhan, China]."

Dominic Dwyer, microbiologist, Austrian WHO investigative team

The WHO team investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus arrives at the heavily guarded Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in February. Photograph: Héctor Retamal/AFP/Getty Images

 

Much-needed answers to questions regarding the true provenance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 remain elusive. China's initial identification of a wet market in Wuhan as the source of the novel coronavirus cross-species-infection from animal to human was proven to be untrustworthy. And as the virus flamed out of China to invade the world at large, the peculiar coincidence of a virology laboratory located in sneezing distance of where the first COVID cases were detected raised suspicions that all was not as revealed.

China's first BSL-4 laboratory, a classification representing facilities equipped to deal with dangerous pathogens, was located adjacent the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory had most recently been involved in research on coronaviruses and in particular on bat coronaviruses, the very type believed to be most closely related to the virus causing COVID-19. U.S. diplomats visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018.

What they saw there persuaded them to send a cable to Washington with a warning about the lax standards at the facility and the risk it potentially posed of possibly becoming the future source of a pandemic. In January of 2021 the State Department claimed it had evidence staff at the Chinese institute were revealed to have symptoms now known to be those of  COVID-19, back in the fall of 2019.

This would not have been the first time that a high-security virology laboratory in China posed as a possible source of runaway globe-altering pathogens on the loose. The Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in 2013 had been accused of "appalling irresponsibility" when scientists there mixed avian and human influenza viruses in the creation of a new and potentially deadly hybrid. Dr.Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist in France warned that the lab might have created a virus with the potential to be the cause of between 500,000 and 100 million global deaths.

When a serious security breach took place at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada in July of 2019, Chinese researchers Xiangguo Qiu, her husband and a Chinese student were escorted from the Winnipeg facility by RCMP and questioned regarding a shipment of Ebola and henipavirus samples, both pathogens flown without adequate safeguards out of the laboratory to Wuhan. There has been silence ever since, no explanation for the event, but the suspicion lingers of scientific espionage.

 

The World Health Organization investigation team discussed the conclusions of its investigation at a press conference in Wuhan, China, on 9 February.   Credit: Kyodo News/Getty

Australia boldly insisted the world required a thorough probe into the origins of COVID-19. Beijing has since exacted a number of penalties on Australia, an important trading partner with China. Threats and attempts at forcing Australia to stand down have been numerous. Eventually the World Health Organization agreed to a more neutral version of the Australian proposal and dispatched a team of ten researchers to China for a two-week period. The team was assigned to conduct interviews and review reports, all under strict surveillance by Chines authorities.

The microbiologists at the Wuhan laboratory knew full well that Chinese authorities expect them to say little and certainly nothing incriminating. Beijing made a point of threatening any medical personnel at the beginning of the epidemic in Wuhan that their professional accreditation would be endangered if they failed to behave with proper circumspection. "If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier I think it would have been a lot better", ophthalmologist Li Wenliang stated.

Shortly afterward the young physician who had been interrogated over having alerted his professional peers to the presence of a strange new and deadly pneumonia-like virus that had entered hospitals, was dead himself from the lethal effects of having contracted COVID. Beijing was found to be funding research into COVID's origins and at the same time censoring results through a specialized task force. Scientists working on bat coronaviruses have had samples confiscated and orders were given to avoid speaking to the press.

Peter Daszak of a World Health Organization team rolls up a vendors layout map of Huanan Seafood market after signing on it as he prepares to leave his hotel for the airport at the end of their WHO mission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)