“There was a difficult situation”: the Americans unearthed the source of coronavirus in China

Since then, hundreds of studies have been published in all the world’s media about what triggered the pandemic.

The other day, research journalists Vanity Fair and ProPublica described their version of what could have happened in November 2019 in Wuhan. It is understandable that in light of the complicated relationship between the US and China, the Americans blame Beijing for everything.

The researchers examined documents obtained from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and saw evidence that there was some kind of security emergency in November 2019, and the Chinese military development of a COVID-19 vaccine also began much earlier than is commonly believed. , and were completed earlier than the western ones. They suggested that the virus genome was deciphered just in November 2019, before the appearance of a dangerous type of coronavirus was officially announced.

How likely is the canonical version of an accidentally infected “patient zero” in a wholesale seafood market? Or the leak should really be at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where leading Chinese scientists, some of whom, by the way, were partially funded by the US government, crossed different strains to assess whether they could become more infectious to humans.

Four months ago, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Panel on the Origins of Emerging Pathogens revised the earlier conclusion and stated that both versions (natural and artificial origin of COVID-19) have a right to exist and neither is removed from the agenda.

In June 2021, with attempts to find out the truth almost deadlocked, they called on Dr. Robert Kadlec, former Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response under President Donald Trump, to form another team to investigate the leading stories about what happened.

US researchers have found that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a cutting-edge biotech institution that has been at the center of suspicion since the beginning of the pandemic, may have been more involved in what happened than is thought.

This is evidenced by explosive documents discovered by the Senate investigation team.

The nine-member team devoted 15 months of their lives to investigating the origins of COVID-19. Commissioned by Senator Richard Burr, they examined extensive evidence, most of which was found openly online, and weighed the main credible theories about how the new coronavirus got to people. An interim report released by U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Minority Oversight Officers concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “most likely the result of some incident.”

The team members used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access the dispatches archived on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) website.

Ever since the Chinese city of Wuhan was identified as the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of scientists suspected that the virus might have leaked from one of the laboratories at the WIV complex. WIV is the site of some of China’s most risky coronavirus research. The local scientists in their work mixed the components of various coronaviruses and created new strains, trying to predict the risks of human infection and develop vaccines and treatments. There have also been critics of such projects, who argued that the creation of viruses that do not exist in nature carries the risk that one day they will be free.

WIV is located on two campuses, and both of them have been conducting coronavirus research. The old Xiaohongshan campus is only eight miles from the infamous seafood market where COVID-19 “first came into public view.” The new Zhengdian campus is about 18 miles to the south, the address of the Institute’s most prestigious laboratory, a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facility designed to ensure safe research on the world’s deadliest pathogens.

Like many scientific institutes in China, WIV is under the total control of the state and financed by it. The research carried out there should first of all contribute to the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). WIV received permission to begin full-fledged experiments in this area by the beginning of 2018.

Week after week, the scholars described their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV website. These dispatches, intended for vigilant superiors, typically consisted of upbeat descriptions of recruiting efforts and summaries of meetings that highlighted the pursuit of Beijing’s political goals. “Headings and opening paragraphs seem completely harmless,” say American researchers. “If you hadn’t looked more closely, you would probably have thought that there was nothing like that here.”

However, according to experts, in these messages, echoes of real life were felt, and it did not look entirely cloudless: tension among colleagues, insults from superiors, reprimands from the party leadership. Grievances were often recounted in the form of a narrative of heroism—a focus on the challenges overcome and challenges faced despite great odds.

The BSL-4 laboratory staff repeatedly complained about the “three buts” problem: lack of equipment and technology standards, lack of design and construction teams, and lack of operating or maintenance experience [лаборатории такого калибра]”.

In the fall of 2019, the messages took an even darker turn. On November 12, members of the party branch at the BSL-4 lab posted a mailing list stating a possible biosecurity breach at the institute:

Was it some kind of recognition of the ongoing crisis?

Throughout the pandemic, WIV has largely remained a “black box” due to the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate with international research. After reviewing the WIV records, the researchers found new evidence purporting to support the interim report’s assessment that the pandemic was “most likely” a lab accident.

On November 19, 2019, seven days after members of the Zhengdian Party Branch wrote their memo to protect themselves from virus dangers, an official guest arrived from Beijing with “important oral remarks and written instructions” from the party leadership to resolve the “difficult and serious situation.

His visit was billed as a safety training seminar for a small, high-level audience, including WIV research department heads and senior biosafety officials.

According to the researchers, this appeared to be an “unusual event” and was different from the annual safety training that had been held six months earlier and that the PRC’s top leadership may have been briefed about the emergency at WIV…

Yes, such a version probably also has the right to exist. But we probably won’t know the truth very soon.

Moreover, in response to the appearance of such investigations, the Chinese habitually respond that an international panel convened by the World Health Organization concluded that “the allegation of a leak from the laboratory is extremely unlikely. The conclusion should be respected….From the very beginning, China has taken a scientific, professional, serious and responsible stance in tracing the origin of the coronavirus.”

China believes that US politicians and journalists are simply “distorting the facts and the truth” and adding that the US should “stop using the epidemic for political manipulation and blame games.”

So the question of what served as the zero point of the coronavirus is still open.