The media is always the last to know: The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis.

Be sure to read it all.

I have a couple of observations, here and here.

Oh.

For a long time, there was a large and seemingly ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that a lab leak or accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. But there wasn’t a smoking gun, something akin to a confession or a contemporaneous internal communication indicating there had indeed been some sort accident.

Today ProPublica and Vanity Fair report on Toy Reid, a China specialist for the RAND Corporation and a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department, who reviewed hundreds of dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Reid worked as part of a team assembled by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”

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.”

Oh, a warning that these viruses “come without a shadow and leave without a trace” in November 2019, you say? Hey, did anything unusual happen in Wuhan, China, in the following weeks?

For those wondering about the reliability and authenticity of the documents:

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

Whatever was going on, it was serious enough to be communicated to Xi Jinping, around November 21…

And this is why you come to SDA each day: To get 2022’s news two years in advance.

John Solomon;

Scientists are entertaining the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 not only leaked from a lab but had been genetically modified, based on new research into the “peculiar pattern of unique restriction endonuclease recognition sites” in the virus.

This pattern allows “efficient dis- and re-assembly of the viral genome characteristic of synthetic viruses,” according to the Oct. 20 preprint by mathematical biologist Alex Washburne, Duke University pharmacologist Antonius VanDongen and University of Wurzburg molecular immunologist Valentin Bruttel.

The “fingerprint” of this “stitching” and the “pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses,” the researchers wrote.

“The BsaI/BsmBI restriction map of SARS-CoV-2 is unlike any wild-type coronavirus, and it is unlikely to evolve from its closest relatives.” […]

“I tried to poke holes in this study, really hard, and I hate its findings,” University College London Genetics Institute Director Francois Balloux wrote in a tweet thread that concluded the preprint “looks solid both conceptually and methodologically.”

Balloux said he was “able to replicate the key findings” and called the paper “by far the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin.” He predicted “Covid twitter will combust in an implosion of rage and fury over this preprint.”

And,

Fauci’s official work calendar from November 2019 to March 2020 suggests he feared the virus didn’t have natural origin, according to Open the Books, which recently obtained the document through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

It shows Fauci had several previously unreported “top-secret” and “restricted” meetings with the National Security Council in January and February 2020, in venues including the White House Situation Room. Do these meetings “give the impression people-in-the-know thought the virus had a natural origin?” Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski wrote.

See how they narrate: When the most likely explanation becomes “extraordinary claim”.