COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Labhttps://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-labToy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese. Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination with the Dalai Lama into a master’s degree in East Asian philosophy and religion at Harvard. Along the way, he picked up Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and achieved fluency in Chinese.
But it was his career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials.
Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”
For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”
As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.
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And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.
once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.
Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above? Reading between the lines, Reid concluded, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”
And that, in fact, is exactly what happened next, according to a meeting summary uploaded nine days later.
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The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.
Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.
Circumlocution is not a peculiarly Chinese phenomenon. It's actually more like a survival technique in multiple authoritarian regimes (imagine communicating unwelcome bad news to Putin or Mao or Stalin or Hitler or etc.).
The is article is very long, and kind of fills in blanks or colors in outlines of things already known (not necessarily widely). Working from memory, here are some bits and pieces that have been "known" for a year or two in chronological order:
Late Summer and early Fall 2019 - Increase in Wuhan-based diarrhea (a Covid symptom) seach engine volume and in automobile traffic near Wuhan hospitals in satellite images;
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42669767October 2019: Cell phone usage data and satellite photo images indicate a ~2 week period in which cell phone activity and auto traffic decreased and ceased in and near the WIV;
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6884792-MACE-E-PAI-COVID-19-ANALYSIS-Redacted.html ,
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/report-says-cellphone-data-suggests-october-shutdown-wuhan-lab-experts-n1202716Late November or early December 2019: First publicly acknowledged cases of Covid have been hospitalized in Wuhan;
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext ;
December 25, 2019: Doctors in Wuhan hospitals informally advise each other to take special precautions when around patients exhibiting certain symptoms;
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/IzzCnz4Yr2jEIYZePiu_ow (Chinese language) ;
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30382-2/fulltext ;
December 27-January 3, 2020, 2019 - January 1, 2020: Multiple labs in Wuhan have partly or fully sequenced the DNA of what came to be called the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and are ordered to cease and destroy their tests and samples;
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-of-the-coronavirus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-in-china ;
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-29/in-depth-how-early-signs-of-a-sars-like-virus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-101521745.html ;
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-29/in-depth-how-early-signs-of-a-sars-like-virus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-101521745.html ;
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-of-the-coronavirus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-in-china ;
December 31, 2019: Outside observers of Hubei Provincial government announcements notice and report to the world that there is an ongoing outbreak of a serious previously unknown disease in Wuhan;
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/29-06-2020-covidtimeline ;
January 1-20, 2020: China and WHO deny that evidence of human-human transmission of what came to be called Covid had been observed;
December 31, 2019 -
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2019123108989 (Chinese language, second paragraph)
January 3, 2020 (China) -
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020010309017 (Chinese language)
January 5, 2020 (China) -
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020010509020 (Chinese language)
January 11, 2020 (China) -
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020011109035 (Chinese language)
January 14, 2020 (China) -
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020011409039 (Chinese language)
January 15, 2020 (China) -
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020011509040 ,
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/xwzx_28/gsgg/202004/t20200430_1199594.shtml (Chinese language)
January 17, 2020 (China) - Wuhan Municipal Health Commission claimed no cases among related contacts;
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020011809064 (Chinese language)
January 19, 2020 -
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51168333January 19/20, 2020 (China) -
http://wjw.wuhan.gov.cn/front/web/showDetail/2020012009077 (Chinese language)
January 10, 2020: Wuhan Institute of Virology announced the availability of a test kit for Covid;
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-04/06/c_138951662.htm ;
January 11, 2020: A university professor who had access to the information communicated to the outside world the DNA sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (with this key information, several western pharmaceuticals companies had their first "prototype" vaccines designed within days);
https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/ ;
http://virological.org/t/novel-2019-coronavirus-genome/319 ;
January 20, 2020: China and WHO acknowledged that human-human transmission was happening;
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/human-human-transmission-coronavirus-reported-china/story?id=68403105 ;
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-of-the-coronavirus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-in-chinaJanuary 23, 2020: China shut down domestic travel out of Hubei Province,
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/23/c_138728067.htm ,
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-01-27/5-million-people-left-Wuhan-before-the-lockdown-where-did-they-go--NACCu9wItW/index.html , (but not international travel out of China, which China shut down days or weeks later,
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-china-airlines-resume-global-flights-cancel-12390606 ).
The picture I get from the article is that China lacked the knowledge, expertise, and key materials to be operating BSL3 and BSL4 laboratories (the most stringent) safely. IOW, a lab leak was a question of when and what, not if. Xi said, "Make it so," and leak happened. The article reinforces the possibility/likelihood that the leak happened in September or early October 2019, was incompletely cleaned/contained, and some lab worker carried it out of the lab and started the spread.
The open air market - vegetables and fruit as well as meat - was simply
an outbreak point, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not found on any of the meat or meat vendors. IOW, a vendor or customer brought it in and started that outbreak.
