The U.S. State Department says that in the autumn of 2019, before the first identified case of COVID-19, several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick with an illness that may have been COVID-19.
“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 of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses,” the State Department reported on Jan. 15, 2021.
“Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one. The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness,” the agency wrote in a new fact sheet.
None of that cooperation is likely to happen from the Chinese, but the report goes on to detail the experiments going on at the Wuhan lab, including, “starting in 2016 – and with no indication of a stop prior to the COVID-19 outbreak – WIV researchers conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar).”
Secrecy is standard operating procedure for China. The State Department says that the U.S. has raised concerns for years about China’s past biological weapons work, which fall under obligations of the Biological Weapons Convention.
The lab was engaged in international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins [anteaters], the report says.
“Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017,” the State Department alleged.
