AMERICA POINTS FINGER AT CHINA LAB
287 DAYS after MoS f irst spotlighted Wuhan virus lab, US says staff fell ill weeks before world knew of Covid
THE Chinese government is under growing pressure to reveal the true origins of the coronavirus pandemic after US intelligence placed a Wuhan lab at the centre of the mystery.
American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in autumn 2019 – weeks before the alarm was raised about the contagion ravaging the city. He also claimed its scientists were experimenting with a bat coronavirus very similar to the one that causes Covid, and had worked on secret military projects.
The Mail on Sunday first revealed concerns about the secretive lab on April 5 last year – some 287 days ago. Now the
new allegations from the top of the US administration come as investigators from the World Health Organisation (WHO) land in Wuhan to look into the pandemic’s origins. However, the team will be under the close scrutiny of Beijing officials and have no plans to visit the institute. They have also been accused of downplaying concerns that a leak was to blame.
Last night Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, called for full transparency, saying: ‘The secrecy surrounding Covid has cost millions of lives and destroyed people’s futures. It has to stop. It’s time we pushed for greater access from the WHO and joined others to sanction those keeping secrets.’
Mr Pompeo, who will leave office next week when Joe Biden succeeds Donald Trump in the White House, said: ‘Beijing continues to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one.’
The Wuhan site was one of just five laboratories in the world carrying out controversial ‘gain of function’ research, which artificially speeds up the evolution of viruses and, in some cases, enhances their ability to infect humans.
As The Mail on Sunday revealed last year, the scientists were manipulating corona– viruses sampled from bats in caves nearly
‘Once this virus’s test tube is open, it’s like Pandora’s Box’
1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is suspected to have originated. In some cases they used a method of cloning that leaves no trace of lab engineering.
This newspaper has also now unearthed minutes from a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party branch at the institute from November 2019 which warned that the lab was dealing with ‘highly pathogenic micro-organisms’ and states that ‘once the test tube containing the virus is opened it is like opening a Pandora’s Box’.
Matthew Pottinger, who stood down as Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser this month, recently said the most ‘credible’ theory about the origin of this new coronavirus was that it escaped from a laboratory in China – and that the Wuhan institute was the most likely source.
The British Government has been cautious about speculating on the causes of the pandemic before the conclusion of the WHO investigation, which could take years. Yet critics have called the probe a ‘whitewash’ since its composition and access to data are dictated by the Chinese regime.
Beijing has backed away from its original claim that the virus originated in Wuhan’s wet market, but no plausible alternative theory has yet emerged. Many prominent scientists still think there was natural transmission from an animal.
The US government does not believe the leak was deliberate, but was a catastrophic accident caused by poor safety procedures surrounding the high-risk experiments.
One of the leading Wuhan scientists, ‘ Batwoman’ Shi Zhengli, admitted her first thought on hearing about the virus was to wonder if it was a leak from her lab.
A British security source said: ‘If the US claims can be substantiated, it would finally give the lie to the theory that a bat travelled 1,000 miles to infect a pangolin in a Wuhan wet market which then somehow jumped the species barrier to people – and just a few miles from the only laboratory in China which manipulates bat viruses to make them contagious to humans.’
In its statement released late on Friday, the US State Department said that it was ‘sharing new information’ about the lab, outlining its belief that ‘ several researchers inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
‘This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students.’
The statement added that the institute has ‘not been transparent’ about its work on bat coronaviruses, and that far from being a purely civilian lab, it had ‘collaborated on secret projects with China’s military [and] engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017’. The statement criticised China’s clampdown on ‘doctors, scientists, and journalists who tried to alert the world’, and said vital data was still being withheld. It concluded that the credibility of the WHO inquiry would suffer without unfettered access ‘ t o virus samples, l ab records and personnel, eyewitnesses, and whistleblowers’.
Many experts now believe that the virus was brought into the Wuhan market by customers, rather than originating there.
Despite intensive efforts, researchers have failed to find a clear ‘intermediate host’– an animal that would have allowed the virus to jump from bats to humans. The WHO is still dismissive of suggestions the pandemic could have started with a lab leak. Peter Ben Embarek, head of the ten investigators who landed in Wuhan last week, insisted that Covid-19 ‘is clearly a natural virus’, and that the lab leak theory was ‘unlikely’ to be true.
He conceded his team would investigate the possibility of a leak, but his pre-emptive statement will fuel fears that the WHO, long criticised for its complacency and complicity with the Chinese regime, is engaged in a whitewash.
‘Lab collaborated with the military on secret projects’
THE mystery of Wuhan – did the Covid-19 outbreak originate in a state laboratory there? – has now reached a new level. The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has added his powerful voice to those asking for the truth.
The US State Department, in a document of great sobriety and caution, did not suggest that the virus was intentionally engineered or released on purpose.
Even so, it flatly accused China’s ruling Communist Party of systematically preventing a proper investigation into the origin of the pandemic.
It complained that China’s authorities have a ‘deadly obsession with secrecy and control’ and have chosen instead to ‘ devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation’.
Washington also suggested that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been involved in military work, even though it poses as a civilian institution.
The State Department said that the WIV had collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military and had done classified research, includi ng animal experiments, on behalf of China’s defence sector. It said it had ‘a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV’.
This is extraordinarily tough language at such a high level. Mr Pompeo was careful not to make any specific allegations about what may have happened. But he revealed, in a major development, that the US has ‘reason to believe’ that several researchers inside the WIV fell ill in the autumn of 2019, weeks before the first officially identified case of Covid. They had symptoms consistent with both Covid and common seasonal illnesses. US experts also claim that Wuhan scientists were working with a bat coronavirus that is 96.2 per cent similar genetically to the virus that causes Covid.
Could this autumn 2019 outbreak have been the first case o f Covid? Could t hi s have resulted f rom a l aboratory accident or unintended crossinfection between animals in laboratories and human researchers? It is vitally important that we should know, and high time, too. The Mail on Sunday first reported on April 5 last year that British Government Ministers had been briefed on intelligence which ‘did not rule out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory’. Those who cast doubt on this revelation at the time have some explaining to do.
The evidence is now piling up that serious independent investigation is required. With a death toll of two million already, even the suggestion that this disaster may have had origins in human error must be pursued until we have clear answers.
The World Health Organisation is looking into events in Wuhan. But will this probe be adequate?
Questions have been raised about one of the inquiry members, Peter Daszak, who has been accused of important conflicts of interest.
The WHO team also cannot be sure of full co-operation from China. As of last night, there was no certainty that the team would even be permitted to visit the WIV itself. Shockingly, neither China nor the WHO will say exactly where they will go.
This is simply not good enough. The world needs to know exactly what happened in Wuhan. If it was a disastrous accident leading to a pandemic, then urgent steps must be taken as quickly as possible to prevent a repeat.
And China has to understand that, as a great and growing power, it needs to accept much higher standards of transparency and frankness than it has shown so far.