The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with viruses. The army of scientists claims to have discovered nearly 2,000 new viruses in just over a decade. It has taken the past 200 years for the rest of the world to discover so many. Even more alarming is the party’s negligence on biosafety. The cost and risk to global health is enormous, as evidenced by a new coronavirus that has escaped Wuhan. This situation cannot continue. The world must hold the Chinese Communist Party to account and punish Beijing for failing to adhere to global biosecurity standards, including basic transparency requirements.
The most recent example of this crime is all around us. The evidence that the virus came from Wuhan is enormous, although largely circumstantial, with most signs pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In America, concerns about the site are now wide and twofold. The Biden administration said it is “deeply concerned” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference in the work of the researchers.
The world has long known that IPH poses a huge risk to global health. Two 2018 State Department cables warned of the biosafety concerns. They even predicted that the SARS-CoV-2 ACE2 receptor identified by WIV scientists would allow human-to-human transmission. Yuan Zhiming, then director of IPH’s biosafety level 4 lab, warned, “The biosafety lab is a double-edged sword: it can be used for the benefit of humanity, but it can also lead to disaster.” He listed the shortcomings prevalent in Chinese biology laboratories, including a lack of “operational technical support, professional instruction” and “achievable standards for the safety requirements of different conservation areas and for the inoculation of microbiological animals and equipment.”
The Chinese public took note, with several bloggers claiming that the IPH virus-carrying animals are being sold as pets. They can even show up in local wet markets. Following the outbreak in Wuhan, a now-vanished blogger asked an ISP investigator to publicly debate 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 that is being done at IPH. In 2015, WIV’s Dr Shi Zhengli co-wrote an article entitled ‘A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence’, in which she admitted that her team had developed ‘chimeric’ and ‘hybrid’ viruses 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 result from taking place in China. “WIV housed tens of thousands of bat virus samples and laboratory animals at the time.