US officials in China had flagged safety issues at Wuhan lab studying coronaviruses: Report

Official cable sent to US after visit to Wuhan lab also warned of potential human transmission representing risk of new SARS-like pandemic, Washington Post article says.

Representational image | A doctor wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) places a saliva swab into a test tube for analysis during coronavirus symptom tests in Germany | Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg

New Delhi: The US embassy in China had sent two official warnings to the US administration in 2018 about inadequate safety at a lab in Wuhan that was conducting research on coronaviruses, an article in The Washington Post said.

Josh Rogin, a columnist with The Washington Post, claimed that the official cables warned about safety and management weakness at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The cable cautioned against potential human transmission that represented a risk of new SARS-like pandemic.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the 19 January 2018 cable found by Rogin, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections.

Concerns about threat to public health not new

The Post article in its ‘Global Opinions’ section quoted Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California in Berkeley: “The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research if it was not being adequately conducted and protected.”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had become the first laboratory in China to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (BSL-4) in 2015.

According to the report, US officials had also met the head of the research project, Shi Zhengli, who had been publishing studies on bat coronaviruses. Zhengli’s research from 2017 had also claimed that a particular type of bats collected from China’s Yunnan province were likely the same bat population that spread SARS in 2003.

WIV had issued a news release in English about these visits, which occurred on 27 March, 2018. However, it removed that statement from its website last week.

The researchers at the WIV have denied on several occasions allegations that the virus leaked from the lab.

The Chinese government has imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of the coronavirus. In February, the Shanghai lab that first shared the coronavirus genome was ordered to be shut down by the Chinese authorities.