According to an investigative report published in the Times of London this week, China’s People’s Liberation Army has been conducting virology research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology since at least 2017. The report suggests that some of the first individuals to be infected with Covid-19 were scientists studying the disease at the WIV. These scientists were reportedly involved in gain-of-function experiments, which involve genetically modifying pathogens to increase the risks of infection to better understand how to mitigate those risks. The report also reveals that Chinese officials locked down a public coronavirus database in September 2019 and altered its data to hide the pathogen’s origins.
The report’s findings contradict claims from Chinese officials and the WIV’s Western financiers that classified civilian-military biological research was not ongoing at the institute and could not have produced the virus that was a precursor to SARS-CoV-2. State Department cables obtained by a journalistic nonprofit reveal the extent of the PLA’s investment in “shadow labs” at the WIV. One heavily redacted internal State Department document contains the following headlines: “Who ordered the cover-up? The signs point to Beijing, not local officials”; “Beijing knew earlier than they admit”; “leaked directive confirms Beijing restricted disclosure of virus information and samples”; “Xi lied to obfuscate his role in the cover-up”; and, perhaps most damning of all, “Initial outbreak could have been contained in China if Beijing had not covered it up.”
Despite the scandalous nature of these revelations, the scandal no longer has much use as a partisan cudgel. U.S. executive agencies that helped fund PLA-linked research at the WIV, including research on a pathogen that is 96% similar to the Covid-19 virus, provided that help in the Trump years. And while Beijing was covering up the emerging plague, Trump himself echoed the assurances the Chinese Communist Party was providing the rest of the world. Democrats, too, have few incentives to get to the bottom of this conspiracy or promote what they find down there. The Biden administration seems committed to engineering a rapprochement with Beijing and has already forgotten the brazen Chinese military incursion into U.S. airspace in February.
These revelations demand a full accounting so that we can prevent a similar outbreak from happening in the future. Given China’s increasing risk tolerance, expansionist ambitions, growing technological acumen, and utter disregard for best practices and fail-safes, American voters deserve to know just how the Covid pandemic happened, and they deserve elected representatives who are properly prepared to prevent the next global disaster. However, the politics of the moment are not conducive to good governance, and no one seems inclined to do much of anything about it.
