The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with viruses. His army of scientists claims to have discovered nearly 2,000 new viruses in just over a decade. It took the rest of the world over the last 200 years to discover many. More worrying is the party’s negligence on biosafety. The costs and risk to global health are enormous, as evidenced by a new coronavirus that escaped from Wuhan. This situation cannot continue. The world must hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and punish Beijing if it does not meet global biosafety standards, including basic transparency requirements.
The most recent example of this malfunction is occurring around us. The evidence that the virus comes from Wuhan is enormous, albeit largely circumstantial, and most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In the United States, concern for the site is now widespread and bipartisan. The Biden administration said it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference in the work of researchers.
The world has long known that WIV poses a huge risk to global health. Two 2018 State Department cables warned of their biosafety issues. They even predicted that the SARS-CoV-2 ACE2 receptor, identified by WIV scientists, would allow transmission between humans. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s Level 4 biosafety lab, warned: “The biosafety lab is a double-edged sword: it can be used for the benefit of humanity, but it can also cause disaster.” He listed the prevalent deficits among China’s biology laboratories, including the lack of “operational technical support, professional instructions” and “feasible standards for the safety requirements of different protection zones and for the inoculation of animals and microbiological equipment “.
The Chinese public took note, and several bloggers alleged that animals carrying WIV virus are sold as pets. They can even appear in local wet markets. After the Wuhan outbreak, a missing blogger asked a WIV researcher to publicly discuss the lab’s biosafety practices. The offer was ignored.
Beijing has a moral and legal obligation to take biosafety seriously, especially given the type of research being done at WIV. In 2015, Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV co-wrote an article entitled “A cluster of SARS-like bat coronaviruses shows the potential for human appearance” in which she admitted that her team had designed “chimeric” viruses and ” hybrids “from horseshoe bats. In a 2019 article titled “Bat Coronavirus in China,” Ms. Shi and her co-authors warned, “It is very likely that future SARS or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats and there are a higher probability that this will happen in China “. At the time, WIV contained tens of thousands of bat virus samples and experimental animals.