*If* the WaPo reporting about the lab in Wuhan (WIV) is correct,
Last edited Wed Apr 15, 2020, 11:50 PM - Edit history (2)
then there are some mighty damning implications for the Trump administration.
The story goes that US officials in China were making regular visits and inspections to the WIV in early 2018 (as the US had helped fund and build the lab, and was helping to train the staff) and were very disturbed by what they witnessed, in terms of biosafety. They reported their findings back home to the Trump administration.
There is no evidence (to my knowledge) that the Trump administration properly or thoroughly responded to that concern, or even *if they responded at all*. It's difficult to overstate how irresponsible that is.
Whether this particular virus had escaped from that lab or not, that Trump did NOTHING about a situation that very easily *could* have caused this pandemic, is quite likely one of the causes of him trying so very hard to make sure China gets all of the blame (China is to blame, no doubt. Their behavior was/is despicable.)
(Also note: a wild-type virus escaping from a lab *is not* the same as saying it was bioengineered (which it clearly isn't) or that there's some biowarfare conspiracy theory. Learning that a lab such as this, in that location, working on bat coronaviruses, were being observed to have serious safety deficiencies, it is very natural to wonder whether an accidental release happened.)
Trump's excessive use of projection just magnifies this issue. He knew, in 2018, of the risk and did nothing.
I hope we eventually get the whole truth of this story.
ETA: Link to a SciAm story
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli has identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves, and she warns there are more out there
By Jane Qiu on March 11, 2020
BEIJING—The mysterious patient samples arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 P.M. on December 30, 2019. Moments later, Shi Zhengli’s cell phone rang. It was her boss, the institute’s director. The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate. If the finding was confirmed, the new pathogen could pose a serious public health threat—because it belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses as the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a disease that plagued 8,100 people and killed nearly 800 of them between 2002 and 2003. “Drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now,” she recalls the director saying.
Shi—a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprits, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”
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