Pirate's Cove

The Washington Post isn’t quite ready to lean toward the notion of COVID19 having leaked from the Wuhan lab yet, though

China’s struggles with lab safety carry danger of another pandemic

In the summer of 2019, a mysterious accident occurred inside a government-run biomedical complex in north-central China, a facility that handles a pathogen notorious for its ability to pass easily from animals to humans.

There were no alarms or flashing lights to alert workers to the defect in a sanitation system that was supposed to kill germs in the vaccine plant’s waste. When the system failed in late July that year, millions of airborne microbes began seeping invisibly from exhaust vents and drifting into nearby neighborhoods. Nearly a month passed before the problem was discovered and fixed, and four months before the public was informed. By then, at least 10,000 people had been exposed, with hundreds developing symptomatic illnesses, scientific studies later concluded.

The events occurred not in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus pandemic began, but in another Chinese city, Lanzhou, 800 miles to the southeast. The leaking pathogens were bacterial spores that cause brucellosis, a common livestock disease that can lead to chronic illness or even death in humans if not treated. As the pandemic enters its fourth year, new details about the little-known Lanzhou incident offer a revealing glimpse into a much larger — and largely hidden — struggle with biosafety across China in late 2019, at the precise moment when both the brucellosis incident and the coronavirus outbreak were coming to light.

Multiple probes into both events by U.S. and international scientists and lawmakers are spotlighting what experts describe as China’s vulnerability to serious lab accidents, exposing problems that allowed deadly pathogens to escape in the past and could well do so again, potentially triggering another pandemic.

China has had many leaks leading to smaller pandemics, such as SARS and swine flu. Wuhan was working with coronaviruses in bats just up the road from the wet market. Their security has been known to be lax, and you know they are working on these for biowarfare.

Beijing has embarked on a major expansion of the country’s biotechnology sector, pouring billions of dollars into constructing dozens of laboratories and encouraging cutting-edge — and sometimes controversial — research in fields including genetic engineering, and experimental vaccines and therapeutics. The expansion is part of a government-mandated effort to rival or surpass the scientific capabilities of the United States and other Western powers. Yet, safety practices in China’s new labs have failed to keep pace, a Washington Post examination has found.

But

Whether lab safety was a factor in the coronavirus outbreak remains unclear. The World Health Organization and the U.S. intelligence community both continue to point to a possible lab accident as one of the two ways that the pandemic may have started. In an updated intelligence assessment revealed publicly in February, Energy Department analysts joined the FBI in concluding that a lab leak was the most likely cause, although some other U.S. agencies continued to side with scientists who think a natural spillover from infected animals — perhaps raccoon dogs, sold at a Wuhan market — is to blame. Advocates of both theories expressed only low or moderate confidence in their conclusions.

Despite all the Washington Post research, they aren’t quite willing to truly think that a lab leak is the most likely source for Wuhan flu. Despite a long, long piece on lab safety issues in China, you know they don’t want to embrace the most likely scenario, because Trump pushed it, and so do Republicans.

Read: Surprise: China Is Struggling With Lab Safety »