What really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid erupted - 0 views
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One of the reasons there is no published information on such work, according to all three investigators, is because the shadow project on the mine viruses at the Wuhan institute was being funded by the Chinese military.
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The State Department investigators wrote in their report: “Despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
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A report published in April, co-authored by Dr Robert Kadlec, who was responsible for the US’s vaccine development programme, concluded that Zhou’s team must have been working on a vaccine no later than November 2019 — just as the pandemic began. One of the US investigators said testimony from scientists connected to the Wuhan institute’s collaborators suggested Covid-19 vaccine work was going on at the laboratory before the outbreak.
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The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.
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The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.
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The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
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The PLA had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists on a study of the Mers coronavirus and was working with them at the time of the outbreak.
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Suspicion fell on him after the pandemic because he produced a patent for a Covid vaccine with remarkable speed in February 2020, little more than a month after the outbreak of the virus had first been admitted to the world by China.
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In May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died, a fact mentioned only in passing in a Chinese-media report and in a scientific paper that placed the word “deceased” in brackets after his name. Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.
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However, there was a no-go area: the Moijang mine. Seven of Hughes’s team headed to the mine in June 2020, including Camping Huang, the PhD student who had investigated the miners’ mystery illness soon after they died.
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The investigators also saw communications intercepts that allegedly show three Wuhan institute researchers working at its level 3 laboratory on coronavirus gain-of-function work had fallen sick with coronavirus symptoms in the second week of November 2019, when many experts believe the pandemic began. One of the researchers’ family members later died.
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An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
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On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important “oral and written” instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding “a complex and grave situation”.
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A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid. At the time, the authorities were eager to play down the suggestion that the city’s Huanan seafood market was the source of the outbreak; the study was used to show that the initial hotspots in December and January were several miles away.
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When the study was first published, the Wuhan institute was not marked on the map it provided. So a report by the US Senate did just that — and found the institute right next to the biggest hotspot in the month before the province was locked down on January 23. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.
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Even before the West was told a mysterious virus was killing people in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities were beginning an information clampdown.
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In the first months of the pandemic, there was a strong desire among Chinese scientists to head off to the bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.
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One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.
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When they arrived, they were told the Moijang mine was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours.
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Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. “We did provide documentation to show we were there legally,” said Hughes. “But there was just too much fear and so they didn’t release those samples.”
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Most coronavirus experts in China, she said, were too fearful of the consequences to examine Covid’s origins. “They haven’t touched it because of the risks associated with working on it.