American officials urgently sent a secret message to Washington after a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What they saw inside was deeply troubling.
A bombshell report provides a shocking answer to the origins of the Chinese virus.
President Donald Trump says that America is investigating whether the new coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan was the result of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was set up to study SARS which was traced to horseshoe bats in Yunnan province.
Shi Zhengli, known as China’s ‘Bat Woman’ for her years of research in the field found out quickly through gene-sequencing that the new coronavirus was close to horseshoe bats in Yunnan, 1000 miles away from Wuhan.
The Chinese Government muzzled her findings.
The Chinese government has also placed severe restrictions on research into the origins on the outbreak.
Not only was the Wuhan Institute of Virology studying coronaviruses from that same type of bat, American officials warned that conditions within the laboratory were unsafe.
According to the Daily Wire:
“In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4),” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reported Tuesday. “What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington.”
“The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help,” The Post added. “The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”
The January 2018 cable stated that the U.S. officials who had repeatedly visited the lab “noted the new lab ha[d] a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
“Most importantly, the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus,” the cable continued. “This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
It seems highly unlikely that it is merely a coincidence that a horseshoe bat coronavirus epidemic started miles away from where a laboratory with a shortage of properly trained scientists was studying horseshoe bat coronaviruses.
Even if the virus came from a laboratory it doesn’t mean that the Chinese government had altered it. American officials noted the risk years ago that coronaviruses can pass to humans.
The American government needs to research this matter thoroughly because it influences both research into the virus and foreign policy.
President Trump has promised to get to the bottom of this serious issue.