The Daily Observer London Desk: Reporter- John Furner
Warnings from US researchers about genetically engineered viruses at China’s bat lab were raised years before the Covid-19 pandemic, but were ignored or censored.
Newly obtained records show how an NIH official raised serious concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s plan to engineer Ebola strains in 2017.
The lab – where the FBI believes Covid leaked from – was found to have a ‘serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate’.
The unnamed official, from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was run by Anthony Fauci at the time, was instructed to erase the safety failures in her report to avoid angering China.
And this was not the first time concerns over engineered viruses was dismissed.
A year prior US energy officials warned the NIAID of the dangers of genetically engineered and altered pathogens. However, longtime head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, called the claims ‘science fiction.’
President Barack Obama shakes hands with Francis Collins, director of National Institutes of Health in 2009. Collins said warnings of dangerous genetically engineered viruses were ‘science fiction’
Pictured: The Wuhan Institute of Virology,the lab believed to be the origin of Covid-19
In 2017, the NIAID official visited the lab in Wuhan. That year, China was establishing its first biosafety level 4 lab at the WIV in hopes to study some of the world’s most lethal pathogens with funding from France, Canada and the US’s National Institutes of Health.
The US was indirectly funding the WIV research through grants awarded to EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a controversial research group at the center of the Covid lab leak theory, which then sent money to the WIV.
The NIAID official later wrote in emails to her superiors she was alarmed after learning the WIV researchers were planning on studying Ebola.
However, because China prohibited importing the lethal virus, the team was going to use a technique called reverse genetics to engineer it in their lab.
While preparing her official report on the lab tour to be submitted to the US embassy in Beijing, the NIAID employee sent emails to colleagues about her worries of divulging the Ebola detail.
In the emails, obtained by Vanity Fair, she wrote: ‘I don’t want the information particularly using reverse genetics to create viruses to get out,’ which she believed would impair the collaboration between NIAID and the WIV.
She added: ‘I was shocked to hear what [the WIV technician] said [about reverse engineering Ebola]. I also worry the reaction of people in Washington when they read this.
‘I don’t feel comfortable for broader audience within the government circle. It could be very sensitive.’
F. Gray Handley, then NIAID’s associate director for international research affairs, responded to the email agreeing with the official. His response included: ‘As we discussed. Delete that comment.’
Shi Zhengli – dubbed the ‘Bat Lady’ or ‘Bat Woman’ for her work on bat coronaviruses – investigated the possibility Covid could have emerged from her lab back in 2020, according to colleagues
