It’s late March 2018 and the US career diplomat Rick Switzer has just flown home to Beijing after a trip to Wuhan. Along with his colleague Jamie Fouss, the US consul-general in Wuhan, he’d led a delegation of American environmental, science, technology and health consular staff to inspect the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where he’d met Shi Zhengli, the “batwoman”.
It was two years before a pandemic would arise from that very city — perhaps even that very laboratory — and he was deeply concerned about what he saw during his visit. The consular official at the US embassy in Beijing tapped out a “sensitive but unclassified” cable to send back to the State Department. He needed to let Washington know just what was going on inside China’s new level-4 biocontainment facility dealing with the world’s deadliest and most contagious pathogens. The cable warned of poor safety practices at the laboratory.
Switzer pressed send on the cable two weeks later, on April 19, 2018, with the subject line: “China Virus Institute Welcomes More US Co-operation on Global Health Security”. It was an unusual choice of email subject, because the contents of his cable outlined how the opposite was true. The laboratory, built on the condition of international collaboration, was severely limiting the number of international researchers who could work inside its walls.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology level-4 lab had originally been built in conjunction with the Jean Mérieux BSL-4 Laboratory in Lyons, France. It was to be China’s first high-containment laboratory under the direction of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is under People’s Liberation Army control. Construction of the laboratory began in 2004 and took 11 years to complete, finally finishing on January 31, 2015. The project cost $44 million. It is a vast building, with four floors stretching over 3,000 sq m (32,000 sq ft). It was accredited in February 2017 by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment, and began working on live viruses by 2018.
There were “intense clashes” between the French and Chinese parties during the construction phase, according to a Chinese Academy of Sciences video. It was far from a smooth process. Even before the deal was signed, there was strong objection in France to co-operating on such a laboratory in Wuhan, but the scientists advocating the collaboration won.
Once the laboratory was up and running, the French were soon kicked out. While the initial funding, training and construction was in conjunction with the French, according to Switzer and Fouss’s cable, “it is entirely China-funded and has been completely China-run since a ‘handover’ ceremony in 2016”. And despite being built in the name of international scientific collaboration, few international researchers were welcome to work inside the facility. “Institute officials said there would be ‘limited availability’ for international and domestic scientists who had gone through the necessary approval process to do research at the lab,” the cable stated.
So a laboratory working with the most lethal pathogens known to humankind had effectively cut off collaboration with the international community.
What made this particularly alarming was the work the laboratory was conducting. Disturbingly, Switzer and Fouss discovered the laboratory was setting up its very own database identifying all deadly viruses with pandemic potential. It would be its own version of a concept called the Global Virome Project (GVP), the cable stated. “The GVP aims to launch this year as an international collaborative effort to identify within ten years virtually all of the planet’s viruses that have pandemic or epidemic potential and the ability to jump to humans,” the cable read.
The cable quoted a Wuhan Institute of Virology official saying: “We hope China will be one of the leading countries to initiate the Global Virome Project.” But in the meantime, the institute official told Switzer and Fouss that they were already running a similar project of their own.
This revelation — of such a database being developed by a laboratory where the US had no oversight — should have been highly alarming. Except it’s unclear whether anybody with any level of seniority ever read this cable after it was sent to the State Department and intelligence apparatus in Washington.
The cable made clear the extent of the US involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “In the last year, the institute has also hosted visits from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation and experts from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.” It said the Galveston branch had trained the Wuhan lab technicians in lab management and maintenance while the US National Science Foundation had just concluded a workshop with the Wuhan Institute in Shenzhen involving 40 scientists from the US and China.
It also made clear — at this early stage — how America was funding the coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab. “NIH was a major funder, along with the National Science Foundation of China, of Sars research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the cable states. The paragraphs that follow are redacted.
Shi Zhengli was well known in the close-knit scientific community that studied bat coronaviruses. She had become a scientific celebrity after discovering the closest virus to Sars in bats. As the director for the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, she became known as the “batwoman” for her sampling of thousands of bats in remote caves.
It was nothing compared with the global fame she would attract after the pandemic outbreak. Her institute’s research, with all its risks, would be exposed for the world to judge.
Shi has in total collected 19,000 samples and coronavirus was detected in 2,481 of them, according to information she provided to the World Health Organisation in February this year. She had been engaging in genetically modifying viruses since at least 2006. A paper published in the Journal of Virology that year shows she was trying to determine how coronaviruses gain the ability to skip from one species to another by “inserting different segments from the human SARS-CoV spike protein into the spike protein of the bat virus”.
When questions arose in China about whether her laboratory was the source of the outbreak at the start of February last year — three months before President Trump raised the prospect — Shi snapped. “Those who believe and spread rumours, shut your dirty mouth,” she posted on the WeChat social media app on February 6. Instead, she said, Covid-19 “is nature’s punishment for uncivilised living habits of human beings. I, Shi Zhengli, use my life to guarantee that it has nothing to do with our lab.”
Just how dangerous was the research she was conducting, often without the watchful eyes of international partners? What were Shi and her colleagues up to, and who was funding it?
Of particular focus would be her “gain-of-function” experiments. Gain-of-function research aims to make viruses more infectious and deadlier or more virulent, often to humans. The technical definition is research that “involves experimentation that is expected to increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens”. It can result in a pathogen acquiring new abilities; for example, a bat virus becoming able to infect humans or a virus that wasn’t airborne having the ability to become so.
This research, which has been carried out in the US and other western countries as well as China, has been justified by scientists who claim it could help predict pandemics by discovering which viruses are capable of becoming infectious to humans. They say this allows them to pre-emptively develop vaccines and therapeutics. But only two laboratories globally were doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses prior to the pandemic.
Other research projects may not strictly fall into the gain-of-function category but are equally dangerous. They include bringing back to life very old viruses and manipulating them in a laboratory. This type of research deals with what are referred to as “potential pandemic pathogens”.
To many outside the scientific community, this type of experimentation sounds absurd. How is it even legal, given the astronomical risks? Debate has raged about the grave dangers of allowing gain-of-function research to take place. There are two main concerns. Firstly, it can be misused for malevolent military purposes such as bioweapons. Secondly, it can accidentally cause a pandemic.
Global controversy around this type of research ignited in 2012, when scientists wanted to see if it would be possible for bird flu (H5N1) to evolve naturally into a virus that was capable of human-to-human transmission, and thus cause a pandemic. Their stated intention was to be able to predict which viruses could turn into a pandemic. Scientists fiercely opposed to gain-of-function research formed a body called the Cambridge Working Group in 2014. There were 200 esteemed signatories. They released a letter specifically warning that accidents while scientists were experimenting with these dangerous viruses could cause “an accidental pandemic” that could infect a quarter of the world’s population. “Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns,” their letter said. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control. Historically, new strains of influenza, once they establish transmission in the human population, have infected a quarter or more of the world’s population within two years.”
This type of research carries such a grave risk of causing a pandemic that President Obama paused funding for gain-of-function experiments in 22 fields in 2014, including research involving Sars, influenza and Mers viruses. This happened after an outcry in the scientific community about the dangerous experiments some virologists were conducting. “Specifically, the funding pause will apply to gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, Mers, or Sars viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route,” the White House statement, dated October 17, 2014, said. “During this pause, the US government will not fund any new projects involving these experiments and encourages those currently conducting this type of work — whether federally funded or not — to voluntarily pause their research while risks and benefits are being reassessed.”
Before the ban took effect, Dr Anthony Fauci, a director at the NIH, had welcomed a voluntary pause on gain-of-function research but argued that “the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature [than as a result of a laboratory accident or leak], and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.”
Fauci, 80, with his calm and measured manner of speech, has cultivated an image as a wise grandfatherly figure. Called “America’s doctor” in the media, he has spent 50 years in public service, joining the NIH during the Vietnam War after studying as a physician. He was appointed director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984. Like many medical officials around the world, he became a household name during the pandemic.
Fauci’s organisation was very familiar with the work undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the NIH and the National Science Foundation visiting the facility in the year prior to April 2018. In total, the NIH has funded at least 60 scientific projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology over the past decade. USAID, the federal aid agency, funded at least 16 (ten of which were jointly funded with the NIH), the Department of Health and Human Services funded three, the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the China–US Collaborative Program on Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases individually each funded one project in conjunction with the Wuhan Institute. Other institutions that frequently collaborate with the institute include the New York Blood Center, the University of North Carolina and University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. At the same time Obama cut off funding for gain-of-function research in America, US money was still flowing to China for risky coronavirus research.
Fauci defended the scientists who had undertaken the highly controversial gain-of-function research that had prompted the global debate, saying they had “conducted their research properly and under the safest and most secure conditions”. The same research that some international scientists said should be banned, Fauci described as “important”. “Within the research community, many have expressed concern that important research progress could come to a halt just because of the fear that someone, somewhere, might attempt to replicate these experiments sloppily,” he wrote in his 2012 paper.
The mandatory “pause” or ban on gain-of-function research was inexplicably lifted under the Trump administration in 2017. No adequate explanation has been given for why this decision was made. There was no public debate. On December 19, 2017, the NIH announced it would resume funding gain-of-function research involving Mers, Sars, coronaviruses and influenza after a new “framework” had been developed by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Senior administration officials told me Fauci did not raise the issue of kickstarting gain-of-function research with any senior figures in the White House. There was one White House meeting, which Fauci requested with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he raised the issue of gain-of-function research. “It kind of just got rammed through,” a senior source claimed.
I asked the former national security adviser Robert O’Brien about this. “I was in meeting after meeting with Dr Fauci, and that never came up,” he says. “I don’t know if he alerted anyone. I never heard about it until I was out of office.” Mike Pompeo, who was director of the CIA from 2017 to 2018, said he didn’t know if Fauci got permission from anyone to re-start the dangerous research, particularly with regard to contributing funding via sub-grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci didn’t even tell his boss, Alex Azar, the health secretary, who only found out the US restriction on gain-of-function research had been lifted from media reports in 2021.
In hindsight we can clearly see that health authorities, the US government and international governments all ignored the warnings from eminent scientists, and allowed the dangerous scientific research to go ahead. The public was never brought into these debates. A pandemic is something that affects all of us — we have lost loved ones, battled serious illness, lost jobs, had our businesses and ways of life destroyed. While the origins of Covid-19 have not yet been established, it’s clear this type of research carries grave risks.
What was even more terrifying was that not only was the NIH funding gain-of-function research in the US — but it was funding research in China, where it had no oversight and no way of knowing how safe the laboratories were where these risky experiments were taking place.
Extracted from What Really Happened in Wuhan: the Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research by Sharri Markson, to be published by HarperCollins on September 30 at £20. Available to order now at amazon.co.uk
