State Department Cables Warned Of Safety Issues At Wuhan Lab Studying Bat Coronaviruses

So, we are back to maybe it was a bioweapon with HIV-like features that escaped from the lab in Wuhan.

Washington Post:

“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.

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 archived on the Internet.

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. …

“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.” “

The Trump administration has this intelligence … TWO YEARS AGO.

The bioweapon thesis has never been refuted. It either had a natural origin in a bat and jumped to humans through a third species like a pangolin, OR, it was something they were studying and tinkering with and it escaped from the lab.