Three pages of January 2018 cables from the U.S. State Department have been released in an effort to provide at least some backing to the unsupported claims from Pompeo, Navarro and company that SARS-CoV-2 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These claims — whether knowing lies or simply stated with disregard for the truth — are part of a propaganda effort to paint China as an enemy and set the stage for popular acceptance of war.
The officials who authored the cables raised concerns about the Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in Wuhan, which was accredited for operation in early 2017, citing inexperienced staff and regulatory unclarity. The intended interpretation of their declassification and release at this time is that the lab screwed up, resulting in either the release of SARS-CoV-2 into the wild or the infection of a staff member by bats or samples from them.
The cables were discussed on the July 26 episode of This Week in Virology, and the experts were not impressed: SARS-CoV-2 can be studied in a BSL-3 laboratory, so BSL-4 is actually more containment than is required; the cables point to a lack of staffing but also to regulatory hurdles that prevented the lab from importing the viruses researchers wished to study, which means that the staffing wouldn’t be an issue; and the lab was working with the University of Texas, Galveston — an extremely well-respected facility — in improving its operation.
The last paragraph of the cables sounds ominous, as it mentions “SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from horseshoe bats” and the ACE2 receptor, the same receptor by which SARS-CoV-2 infects human cells.
But Wuhan virologist Shi Zhengli says that her Wuhan facility is owed an apology. In responses to questions posed to her by Science magazine, she says that the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and any viruses they have studied is significant — only 80% of the genome is the same. The bat virus that is more similar to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar) was sequenced at the lab, but had never grown the bat virus in the laboratory, and would require about 50 years to change by mutations. She believes an intermediate host between bats and humans — not yet identified — is likely to exist, rather than direct bat-to-human transmission.
