The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with viruses. His army of scientists claims 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 many. More worrying is the party’s negligence on biosecurity. The costs and risks to global health are enormous, as evidenced by a new coronavirus that escaped Wuhan. This situation cannot continue. The world must hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and punish Beijing if it fails to meet global biosecurity standards, including basic transparency requirements.
The most recent example of this crime is taking place around us. The evidence that the virus came from Wuhan is enormous, though largely circumstantial, and most signs point 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 bipartisan. The Biden administration has said it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with investigators’ work.
People have known for a long time that WIV poses a huge risk to global health. Two State Department cables in 2018 warned of its biosecurity issues. 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 WIV’s Level 4 biosafety 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 China’s biology laboratories, including the lack of “operational technical support, professional instructions” and “feasible standards for the safety requirements of various protection areas and for the inoculation of animals and microbiological equipment.”
The Chinese public has taken note, with several bloggers claiming that WIV virus-carrying animals are being sold as pets. They can even appear on wet local markets. After the Wuhan outbreak, a missing blogger 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 type of research being conducted at WIV. In 2015, Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV co-wrote an article entitled “A group of SARS-type bat coronaviruses show the potential for human appearance,” in which she acknowledged that her team created “chimeric” and “hybrid” viruses. from horseshoe bats. . In a 2019 article entitled “Bat Coronavirus in China,” Ms. Shi and her co-authors warned: “Future outbreaks of SARS or MERS coronavirus are likely to come from bats and are more likely to this will take place in China. At the time, WIV was home to tens of thousands of bat and experimental animal virus samples.