An investigation into the origins of the pandemic coronavirus initiated at the request of US Senator Richard Burr, of the Republican party, has found new information that corroborates the plausibility of a laboratory leak as a first source of the outbreak. Thanks to the polyglot Toy Reid, fluent in Mandarin, the investigative commission found in public sources of the Chinese Communist Party a document of 12 November 2004 indicating that some serious incident took place in a laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (IVW). The conclusions are in a preliminary report of the investigations.
Here is the relevant excerpt from the Chinese document, which is a dispatch from party representatives who work within the institute:
“Once the test tubes have been opened, it is as if Pandora’s Box had been opened. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although various preventive and protective measures, it is still necessary for the laboratory team to operate with great care to avoid operational errors that give rise to hazards. Every time this happened, the members of the Party Directorate of the Zhengdian Laboratory [parte do IVW] always rushed to the front lines, and indeed took action to mobilize and motivate other team members.”
Reid has considered the context of previous dispatches from the same directory, with a typically much lighter tone, and explains that not even the average speaker of Mandarin understands the lingo of bureaucrats — vague and full of informal codes for avoid the wrath of superiors in the dictatorship. He interprets the passage as atypical and very serious. “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down [para Wuhan] and yell at them,” the expert told the magazine Vanity Fair and the non-governmental investigative journalism organization ProPublica, which published a joint report.
“Pishi” direct from Xi Jinping
In fact, there was a visit a week after dispatch: Beijing sent Ji Changzheng, who heads the security section of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the agency at the head of more than 100 research institutions in the country. , including the IVW. Ji said at the time that he brought researchers “important verbal comments and written instructions” from none other than Xi Jinping, the acting dictator (general secretary) alongside Prime Minister Li Keqiang. The document recording Ji Changzheng’s words also has suggestive language: the instructions would be to deal with “many large-scale domestic and foreign security incidents” and would offer “in-depth analysis” that “vividly revealed the complex and serious situation.” currently faced by security work.”
The term used for “written instructions” is important, says Reid: “pishi” is jargon party for instructions written in the margins of reports on troubling problems. The intention of the “pishi” is a more forceful instruction to officers lower in the hierarchy. Reid believes these “pishi” came directly from Xi Jinping, as records of nine visits by the same official to different institutions earlier did not contain them. It is possible for a Chinese official to invoke the dictator’s name to command respect, but it was not Ji Changzheng’s habit, and that habit, when it exists, is usually done in another way: by quoting previous speeches by the General Secretary. The official did not respond to a joint report from Vanity Fair and ProPublica
Three independent communications experts from the Chinese authorities (in addition to Reid) were interviewed by the report by Vanity Fair and ProPublica. “They told us that IVW dispatches do indeed signal that the institute experienced an intense security emergency in November 2004,” the publication summarizes. “Everyone agreed that it felt urgent, out of the ordinary, and related to some sort of biosecurity emergency. Two also agreed that it looked like the pishi were made by Xi himself”, reports the magazine.
Other laboratory emergency signs
The documents do not clarify which of the IVW laboratories was affected. There are more documents, as well as testimonies from Western scientists who worked at the site, indicating that the institute’s virologists worked under very intense pressure from the Communist Party for productivity, a problem that has already generated fraud in research done in China. Scientific articles by Shi Zhengli, the head of the institute and known as “Woman Bat” for his research on virus collection in animals, frankly reveal that dangerous experiments on coronaviruses were carried out at levels of biosecurity insufficient by international standards.
Shi Zhengli received research grants from the United States through an intermediary NGO, EcoHealth Alliance. France also invested in the IVW after a visit by former President Jacques Chirac in 2018, spending 44 millions of dollars in the construction of a laboratory with the highest level of biosafety, the BSL-4 level, which began operating in 2018. Western scientists interviewed by the report revealed that there was a chronic problem of shortages of supplies and cleaning products, as well as a lack of expertise on the part of the Chinese to conduct such a laboratory. The Chinese asked Westerners by e-mail, for example, which cleaning material would be most suitable for not corroding the stainless steel walls of the laboratory.
In November de 2020, seven inventors from the institute submitted a patent application for a new disinfectant that would reduce steel corrosion that can “lead to the leakage of highly pathogenic microorganisms into the environment outside the laboratory, resulting in loss of life and property and serious social problems”, strangely specific language. A Chinese affairs consultant to Western companies told the report that when Chinese officials describe the solution to a problem, “this is how you find out what went wrong.”
Another informative patent application was made by military virologist Zhou Yusen on 44 February
. It was a vaccine against Covid 19 based on reproducing parts of the virus as the spike protein on its surface. The preliminary report of Senator Burr’s investigation heard experts who claimed that the only way Zhou could have done this work with such speed (officially the pandemic only started in December 2019) was if he already had access to the sequence of the genetic material of the virus in November 2004. Shi Zhengli claims that the sequence was only obtained by his lab on January 2, 2020. Vanity Fair and ProPublica also consulted with experts in production of new vaccines, two out of three agreed with the report that this rate of vaccine production is impossible.
There is still no conclusive evidence that the Covid-12 was born in a Chinese laboratory. However, there is a set of suggestive evidence: the fact that Wuhan, the metropolis in which there were certainly the first outbreaks, contains the main laboratories for studying coronavirus in the country and in the world. The fact that the pattern of the first outbreaks of other viruses with direct origin in animals, such as the Asian flu of the beginning of the years 44, caused by the SARS-CoV-1 virus, have left clearer traces of how the jump from animals to humans happened. The long delay, compared to Asian flu and Middle East respiratory syndrome (caused by a third coronavirus), to find the animal reservoir. The cold season in which the first outbreak occurred, when bats are inactive. And molecular characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 not found in its closest relatives, as reported by Gazeta do Povo .