An investigative report published in the Times of London this week reveals that China’s People’s Liberation Army has been conducting virology research with potential military applications at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) since at least 2017. Intercepted secret Chinese communications, as reported in the Times, suggest that this “covert project of dangerous experiments” was a direct precursor to the global outbreak of Covid-19.
The report indicates that some of the first patients to be infected with the virus were scientists researching the disease at the WIV. These scientists were reportedly engaged in gain-of-function experiments, in which pathogens are genetically altered to increase the risks associated with infection in an effort to better understand how to mitigate those risks. When the researchers, who were relatively young and healthy adults, became severely ill with a flu-like illness in the fall of 2019, Chinese officials did not appear to be confused about the nature of the problem on their hands.
Chinese officials locked down a previously accessible public coronavirus database in September 2019, altered its data to hide the pathogen’s origins, and subsequently took it offline altogether. When Chinese officials eventually revealed the genomic sequence of the virus they had been studying, it led investigators to speculate about the PLA’s apocalyptic objectives.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, despite presenting itself as a civilian institution, has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military, according to a State Department investigator summarizing the conclusions of the government’s inquiry. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation, and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” the investigator said.
Previously unreleased State Department cables obtained by a journalistic nonprofit reveal the extent of the PLA’s investment in “shadow labs” at the WIV. These dispatches contradict claims from Chinese officials and the WIV’s Western financiers, such as EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, who dismissed the prospect that classified civilian-military biological research was ongoing at the institute and could have produced the virus that was a precursor to SARS-CoV-2.
An informed reader will likely conclude that the pandemic that disrupted life across the planet and cost the lives of millions was avoidable. A conspiracy executed by the unscrupulous and paranoid Chinese Communist Party backed by funding from American public-health institutions created the conditions for Covid to spread across the globe. Even granting that there is much we still do not know about the source of this disease and the horrors it wrought, these revelations alone are sufficient to deem this the scandal of the century.
However, partisan politics have hindered any significant action to hold those accountable for the pandemic. The U.S. executive agencies that helped fund what was apparently PLA-linked research at the WIV provided that help during 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. Democratic partisans and lawmakers, on the other hand, summarily dismissed the notion that this uniquely infectious pathogen had genetic markers suggestive of artificial origins from the outset of the pandemic, insisting it was a byproduct of the Right’s addiction to culture warring and racial hostility.
Neither party’s activists enjoy the psychological satisfaction associated with hammering their domestic political opponents over this issue. The true culprits are abroad, safely insulated from partisan political fallout. As a result, no one seems inclined to do much of anything about it. However, 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.
