The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with viruses. His army of scientists claim to have discovered nearly 2,000 new viruses in just over a decade. It has taken the last 200 years for the rest of the world to discover so much. More worrying is the party’s negligence regarding biosafety. The cost and risk to the health of the world is enormous, as evidenced by a new coronavirus that escaped Wuhan. This situation can not continue. The world must hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and punish Beijing if it does not uphold global standards for biosafety, including basic transparency requirements.
The most recent example of this misunderstanding is to play us off. The evidence that the Wuhan virus originates is enormous, although it is largely circumstantial, and most evidence points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In America, the concern about the site is now wide and twofold. The Biden government said it was “deeply concerned” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with the investigators’ work.
The world has long known that WIV poses a major risk to global health. Two cables from the State Department of 2018 warned about the problems with biosafety. They even predicted that SARS-CoV-2’s ACE2 receptor, identified by WIV scientists, would enable human-to-human transmission. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s Level 4 Biosafety Laboratory, warned: ‘The biosafety laboratory is a double-edged sword: it can be used for the benefit of mankind, but can also lead to disaster.’ He listed the shortcomings found in China’s biology laboratories, including a lack of ‘operational technical support, professional instructions’ and ‘achievable standards for the safety requirements of different protection zones and for the vaccination of microbiological animals and equipment.’
The Chinese public has taken note of this, with several bloggers claiming that WIV’s virus-carrying animals are sold as pets. They can even show up at local wet markets. After the outbreak in Wuhan, one blogger who has since disappeared asked a WIV researcher to discuss the laboratory’s biosafety practices in public. The offer was ignored.
Beijing has a moral and legal obligation to take biosafety seriously, especially given the kind of research that is going on at WIV. In 2015, dr. Shi Zhengli, co-worker of the WIV, co-wrote an article entitled ‘A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence’ in which she admits that her team designs ‘chimeric’ and ‘hybrid’ viruses from horseshoe bats has. . In a 2019 article titled ‘Bat Coronavirus in China’, Ms. Shi and her co-authors warn: ‘It is very likely that future SARS or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will be from bats, and are more likely to occur in China. At the time, WIV housed tens of thousands of samples of bat viruses and experimental animals.