Another datum for those of you following the origins of COVID-19 debate. Josh Rogin, writing over at Politco notes that US diplomats were warning about problems in the Wuhan labs as early as 2017, a good two years before the first cases of COVID-19 appeared. The diplomats were concerned that, according to its own accounting, the Wuhan labs lacked enough trained staff to operate the BSL-4 laboratory safely. They sent cables to the state department warning of their concerns about another possible SARS outbreak.
Of course the chuckleheads in the State Department ignored the warning—probably for geopolitical reasons—and there was an outbreak much, much worse than the previous SARS episode. In the US, the question took on a political flavor when Trump suggested the virus may have been manmade causing his political opponents to feel duty bound to deny the possibility. As a result, a year went by with partisans furiously denying the “conspiracy theory” of a lab leak and no investigation into the wisdom of gain-of-function research being done.
As a final, sad note, Rogin writes that
just months into the pandemic, a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab, rather than having leaped from an animal to a human at the Wuhan seafood market or some other random natural setting, as the Chinese government had claimed.
It’s telling that we still can get them to admit this.