US State Department Cables Warned Of Potential 'SARS-Like Pandemic' After Visiting Wuhan Lab Experimenting With Bat Coronavirus

The US State Department received two cables from US Embassy officials in 2018 warning of inadequate safety at a Wuhan, China biolab conducting 'risky studies' on bat coronaviruses, according to the Washington Post, which notes that the cables have "fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus." A US delegation led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy's counselor of environment, science, technology and health took the unusual step of repeatedly visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) - which had become China's first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (BSL-4) in 2015. The last of the visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018, was documented on WIV's website and subsequently scrubbed (archive). US officials were so concerned by what they saw that they warned of a potential pandemic stemming from the lab's work on bat coronaviruses.

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic. -Washington Post "During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory," reads a January, 2018 cable drafted by two officials from the embassy's environment, science and health sections who met with scientists from the WIV. Interestingly, the Chinese researchers were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, however the Chinese had requested additional help. Consequently, the cables warned that the US should give the WIV additional support because of how dangerous the research on bat coronaviruses was. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003. "Most importantly," the cable warns, "the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention." Shi and other researchers have strongly denied that the new virus known as 2019-nCoV came from WIV, after her team was the first to publicly report it.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-state-department-cables-warned-potential-sars-pandemic-after-visiting-wuhan-lab

The U.S. Counselor visited Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS

https://web.archive.org/web/20200404102012/english.whiov.cas.cn/Exchange2016/Foreign_Visits/201804/t20180403_191334.html

Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/