Lo de Taiwan, avisando y pareceria ser la WHO tapando, y esto, va a generar quizas una cadena de sucesos no muy lindos (no quiero imaginar el Roosevelt en Guam)
Pero leamos
de:
In
January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly
sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which
had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of
international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in
English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The
U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick
Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and
health. Last week, WIV erased that
statement from its website, though it remains
“I
don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that
needs to be investigated and answered,” he said. “To understand exactly how
this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the
future.”
Pero leamos
de:
State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan
lab studying bat coronaviruses
April 14, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. GMT-3
Two years
before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a
Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two
official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which
was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled
discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab
was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
What the U.S.
officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they
dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back
to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the
WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I
obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their
potential human transmission represented a risk of a 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 Jan. 19,
2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment,
science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State
Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)
The Chinese
researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National
Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S.
organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued
that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly
because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ 2/12
14/4/2020 State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses - The Washington Post
As the cable
noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to
bat coronaviruses for many years. In November
2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe
bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely
from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.
“Most
importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various
SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified
for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like
coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like
diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued
surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human
interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and
prevention.”
The research
was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it
might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October
2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any
research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function”
experiments.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ 3/12
14/4/2020 State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses - The Washington Post
As many have pointed out, there is no
evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists
largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t
come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said
Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University
of California at 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,” he said.
There are
similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and
Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly
less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of
Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still
refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus
while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ 4/12
14/4/2020 State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses - The Washington Post
Sources
familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave
safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat
coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to
this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems.
“The cable was
a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay
attention to what was going on.”
No extra
assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these
cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the
past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the
pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and
relations with China.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ 5/12
14/4/2020 State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses - The Washington Post
Inside the
Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected
either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was
the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no
evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that
the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that
the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.
“The idea that
is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it
leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it
leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on
the other side,” the official said.
As my
colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s
original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is
shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1,
had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in
the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ 6/12
14/4/2020 State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses - The Washington Post
Shi
and other WIV researchers have categorically denied this lab was the origin for the novel coronavirus. On Feb. 3,
her team was the first to publicly report the virus known as 2019-nCoV was a bat-derived coronavirus.
The Chinese
government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the
virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the
novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that
published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by
authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared.
On
Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring
approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of
the novel coronavirus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ 7/12
14/4/2020 State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses - The Washington Post
The origin
story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel
coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one.
The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the
Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus,
said Xiao.
We don’t know
whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, but the cable
pointed to the danger there and increases the impetus to find out, he said.
