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