3.
The Wuhan whistleblowers
‘The humanities teach us the value, even for business, of criticism and dissent. When there’s a culture of going along to get along, where whistleblowers are discouraged, bad things happen and businesses implode.’
MARTHA NUSSBAUM
It is still unclear when the first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed and linked to a coronavirus. At least two western infectious diseases experts revealed that they first learned of unexplained pneumonia cases in Wuhan hospitals in mid December. One got the news from a Guangzhou scientist through an online epidemiology network and the other heard about a novel coronavirus in Wuhan that ‘looks very serious’ at a dinner party in the US. One account by a lab technician, which has since been removed from the internet, states that a doctor at the Wuhan Central Hospital took a sample from a patient’s lung on 24 December 2019 and sent it to a private firm called Vision Medicals, which reported back two days later that it had found a genetic signature of a coronavirus. According to the Chinese authorities, however, the first person to sound the alarm on the emerging coronavirus was Dr Zhang Jixian, a respiratory specialist at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine. In her mid-fifties in 2019, she had experienced the SARS epidemic of 2002–3 and had been investigating suspected SARS cases in Wuhan during that time. So when, on 26 December 2019, an elderly married couple from a nearby residential community were admitted to the hospital, both suffering from fever and a persistent cough, and a CT scan showed results unlike normal pneumonia, Dr Zhang was immediately concerned. She insisted that their son come to the hospital for a CT scan. The son, who did not live with his parents but had begun caring for them after they fell ill, presented with similar symptoms, and all three showed an unusual pattern of lung shadows on a CT scan.
At this point, Dr Zhang became certain that there was human-to-human transmission of what was likely a virus. On that day, 27 December 2019, the same hospital received another patient with similar symptoms – the blood tests of all four of these patients indicated a non-influenza viral infection – and Zhang reported these troubling cases of mysterious pneumonia to the head of the hospital, who two days later reported it to the local health authorities. Dr Zhang took care to ensure that the growing number of patients with similar symptoms were isolated and that the hospital staff took precautions.
Across town, on 27 December, Dr Ai Fen, the director of the emergency department of the Wuhan Central Hospital, saw her second patient with unusual pneumonia and sent samples for testing. The results came back on the afternoon of 30 December: ‘SARS coronavirus’. Dr Ai circled the word ‘SARS’, photographed it and copied it to a doctor friend at a different hospital in Wuhan. Within an hour and a half, the photo had reached Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Dr Ai’s hospital, who sent a message to approximately 150 of his former classmates on the Chinese social media app WeChat: ‘Seven cases of SARS have been diagnosed at the Huanan Fruit and Seafood Market, quarantined in our hospital’s emergency department.’ He added: ‘Don’t circulate the message outside this group. Get your family and loved ones to take precautions.’ Inevitably, the information was leaked on the internet.
Meanwhile, alerted by Dr Zhang, the Wuhan Health Commission issued the official document ‘emergency notice on reporting the treatment of pneumonia of unknown causes’ to hospitals, instructing them not to make anything public. Within minutes, these orders had leaked online. Later, it would be reported that the Chinese CDC director, Dr George Gao, first learned of the outbreak in Wuhan from these leaked notices on the internet; Dr Gao then called up the head of the Wuhan disease control office who informed him that the outbreak had been going on since the beginning of December, with twenty-five suspected cases. Meanwhile, lung samples from patients had been sent to at least five state labs to sequence the virus.
The WeChat message was spotted by somebody in Taiwan, who contacted Dr Marjorie Pollack, the deputy editor of ProMED-mail, the largest public global surveillance system reporting infectious diseases outbreaks. Dr Pollack, a veteran infectious diseases epidemiologist, had been the first to alert the world outside China to the first SARS outbreak in February 2003. ‘We’re in trouble,’ she thought in a moment of déjà vu. She sent an emergency post to her eighty thousand subscribers at one minute to midnight on 30 December.
As the world learned of the outbreak on the last day of 2019, the Huanan seafood market was being shuttered by the authorities and completely disinfected – hundreds of samples were collected from animal carcasses and surfaces in the market to test for the presence of the novel pathogen. Memories of how SARS had spread from animals in live markets in 2003 were fresh, and a cluster of the pneumonia cases in Wuhan was linked to the market. Officials in protective clothing appeared in the market on the evening of 31 December and began scrubbing the stalls with disinfectant. That day the Wuhan Health Commission used its Weibo social media account to announce that twenty-seven people had contracted the viral pneumonia.
Yet the whistleblowers were penalised for alerting other healthcare workers and the public to the outbreak. On 1 January, Dr Ai was rebuked by her hospital for raising the alarm publicly. Two days later, the ophthalmologist from the same hospital, Dr Li, was interrogated by the local police and formally censured for ‘spreading rumours’. He was accused of severely disturbing the social order and told in writing (he later published an image of the letter): ‘We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice – is that understood?’ He signed the document, alongside his fingerprint in red ink, to indicate that he did. Later, Dr Ai would tell the Chinese magazine Renwu (People), ‘If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared about the reprimand. I would have fucking talked about it to whoever, wherever I could.’
Dr Li developed Covid-19 symptoms a week later and his death from the disease was publicly confirmed on 7 February. Dr Li was only thirty-three and left behind a pregnant wife and a young child. In response to this tragedy, there was an outpouring of grief and widespread fury at the government’s management of the outbreak and Dr Li’s whistleblowing.
We would learn later, from multiple accounts, that the Chinese authorities had obtained the genome sequence of the novel coronavirus by 27 December, and, according to the head of the Jinyintan Hospital, had shared it with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on the same day. In any case, the WIV obtained a genome sequence from patient samples sent to its lab. By 3 January, the Chinese CDC had shared the genome of the virus with companies developing diagnostic kits for the pathogen that was only supposedly a rumour at the time. A day after Dr Li signed the confession letter, the leading Chinese vaccine developer Sinopharm kicked into high gear manufacturing a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. It would be approximately two weeks before the Chinese authorities publicly confirmed evidence of human-to-human transmission on 20 January.
In early January 2020, the hashtag #WuhanSARS began trending on the social media site Weibo and was promptly censored. By the first day of 2020, the Wuhan police had investigated and punished eight people for ‘spreading rumours’ online about the disease, one of whom was Dr Li. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a network of rights groups, at least 254 people would be punished in one week for the crime of spreading rumours.
As one of the countries that had been heavily impacted by the 2003 SARS outbreak, the Taiwanese health authorities were carefully monitoring Chinese social media and spotted the messages from 30 December about seven cases of atypical pneumonia, which they took to mean possible SARS. They too thought human-to-human transmission might be possible because patients were being isolated. So they alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) and requested further information. None was forthcoming, so Taiwan increased its border security and stopped flights to and from Wuhan. The Taiwanese government sent Professor Chuang Yin-ching to lead a group of experts on a fact-finding trip to Wuhan on 13 January 2020. What they saw persuaded them that person-to-person transmission was already rampant despite both China’s and the WHO’s stance that there was no evidence of human-to-human spread at the time. On their return, Taiwan imposed strict border controls and quarantines. Taiwan has still not been invited to join as a member of the WHO and, in recent years, has also been excluded from the World Health Assembly at China’s insistence.
By 18 January, the WHO had been informed by Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, a health-research charity in the UK, of the existence of data consistent with human-to-human transmission of the virus. In Spike, his July 2021 book on the Covid-19 pandemic, he recounts how he had been tipped off by Dr Thijs Kuiken, a leading veterinary pathologist advising the Dutch government. The Lancet medical journal had asked Dr Kuiken to review a research paper from the University of Hong Kong describing a family that had visited relatives in Wuhan and caught the novel coronavirus – without having visited the seafood market. One family member who had not travelled to Wuhan also fell ill. What alarmed Dr Farrar was that this study also described the lack of respiratory symptoms in some of the infected relatives and the possible spread of the virus via asymptomatic but infectious patients. He called for the Lancet to accelerate its peer-review procedure.
Who was the first to be infected by the novel coronavirus?
Today there are clues that the epidemic began before December 2019. Separate groups of scientists analysing genetic data from cases around the world have estimated that the most recent common ancestor of all human cases of SARS-CoV-2 was in somebody or some animal between September and November 2019.
According to government data seen by the South China Morning Post in March 2020, the earliest confirmed case of Covid-19 seemed to trace back to 17 November 2019. This was a fifty-five-year-old man in Hubei province (in which the city of Wuhan resides). The exact location is not disclosed, nor are details of his occupation or recent travel. The hospitals and laboratories that possessed early samples from December 2019 were instructed by the authorities to destroy them for biosafety reasons. Coincidentally, a later study by the University of Kent in Canterbury, in the UK, also came up with 17 November as its best estimate of the first human case, although with a wide margin of error – its earliest estimate for when Covid-19 might have emerged was early October. It did so by repurposing a mathematical device designed for estimating the extinction dates of animal species to the task of estimating the date of the first human case of Covid-19.
Another puzzle is that, a few weeks before, between 18 and 27 October 2019, Wuhan had hosted the Military World Games, in which nine thousand athletes from a hundred countries participated. Bizarrely, Xinhua reported that on 18 September Wuhan Customs and the Executive Committee of the Military World Games held an Emergency Response Exercise, to practise what it would do in the case of two emergencies at the city’s airport: the arrival of baggage with nuclear radiation and the arrival of a passenger infected with a novel coronavirus. Later athletes from several different countries complained that they fell ill while in Wuhan with fever, coughs and diarrhoea. Some were bedridden for weeks. Yet there has been little to no effort to figure out if some of these cases could have been Covid-19. Josh Rogin of the Washington Post, who reported on this story, called it an ‘investigative thread languishing due to neglect’.
It is unfortunate that, in the first year post-outbreak, reports of the true number of Covid-19 cases in December 2019 have been muddled and near impossible to verify. By the time Dr Zhang and Dr Ai raised the alarm, more than a hundred people could well have already contracted the disease. Many international experts have commented on the difficulty of obtaining clarity on the situation in Wuhan early in the outbreak; some have estimated several thousand Covid-19 cases in the city by mid-January 2020. Considering the nature of the Covid-19 disease – in which a majority of infected people show mild to no symptoms – the more severe cases presenting in hospitals in December 2019 would have been the tip of an iceberg of mild infection.
Nonetheless, we know from some very early scientific reports by Chinese scientists that a good portion of the index cases had no links to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. The first elderly couple seen by Dr Zhang on 26 December had not visited the market. Separately, a study by Wuhan and other Chinese scientists published on 24 January 2020 in the prestigious Lancet journal said, ‘The symptom onset date of the first patient identified was Dec 1, 2019. None of his family members developed fever or any respiratory symptoms. No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases.’ This patient had been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus after his respiratory-tract specimen tested positive for the virus. Later, more information would emerge on this first patient, who was an elderly man with Alzheimer’s disease who had not left his home. ‘He lived four or five buses from the seafood market, and because he was sick he basically didn’t go out,’ said a senior doctor at the hospital that treated him.
On 22 June 2021, Dr Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center made a new breakthrough on the origin of Covid-19. Dr Bloom is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator who studies virus evolution and is widely recognised in the virology community. For four months, he had been tracking data from the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan and found mention of an early sequencing dataset from Wuhan University. This data was supposedly available from 30 March 2020 on the database of the US-based National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Yet, upon querying the database, Dr Bloom found that the entire project (PRJNA612766) was missing: ‘No items found’. The only clues lay in a manuscript associated with the project, which described forty-five swab samples from suspected early cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan. The Wuhan authors would not reply to Dr Bloom’s request for information on when the samples had been collected and why they had deleted their data from the database. The Seeker then confirmed that a project with the same serial number had been deleted from China’s database of genetic sequences around the same time between 19 June and 3 July 2020.
This is when Dr Bloom pulled an ingenious move. He could not access the data from the NCBI database, but he had noticed that the files were often stored on Google and Amazon clouds. He deciphered the URL path to the actual data in the cloud. Success. Of the ninety-nine files corresponding to thirty-four early Covid-19 samples, Dr Bloom was able to obtain ninety-seven. These data were only fragments, covering the spike sequence up to the end of a section known as ORF10 in the virus genome. When Dr Rasmus Nielsen of Berkeley became aware of Dr Bloom’s discovery, he described it as ‘the most important data that we have received regarding the origins of Covid19 for more than a year’.
Scientists had been trying for more than a year to predict what the original SARS-CoV-2 virus had looked like at the beginning of the outbreak. Logically, the earliest virus genome should have been the most similar to the closest-related bat coronaviruses. Over time, as it passed through humans, the virus should have evolved to become more distant from what it looked like in bats or other wild animals. However, these scientific efforts had been stymied because the earliest reported virus genomes, especially those from the Huanan seafood market, were not the most similar to bat coronaviruses. In direct opposition to the epidemiological data, none of the virus genomes from the market looked like the parent of all subsequent virus genomes collected elsewhere in the world.
With the deleted data in hand, Dr Bloom determined that the Huanan seafood market sequences were not fully representative of the SARS-CoV-2 viruses circulating in Wuhan in the earliest days of the outbreak. Yet these market sequences had been the focus of the China-WHO study. He wondered why such an informative and valuable dataset describing early Covid-19 cases in Wuhan had been deleted. There was no issue with the data or correction to the Wuhan author’s manuscript. These data, if made easily accessible to scientists worldwide, would have pointed to earlier circulation of the virus in Wuhan even preceding the Huanan seafood market. In view of China’s destruction of early patient samples and gag orders, Dr Bloom observed that these suggested ‘a less than wholehearted effort to trace early spread of the epidemic’. On an optimistic note, however, Dr Bloom pointed out that more data may exist outside China, which scientists could examine for more clues concerning the origin and early spread of Covid-19. He urged a focus on gathering more data and better analysing the data already in our possession.
On 21 July 2021, in response to Dr Bloom’s preprint, the vice minister of China’s National Health Commission tried to clarify the situation by saying that it was the journal editors who deleted data access information in the paper, leading the Wuhan authors to believe that they could remove the data from the NCBI database entirely. However, in a June 2020 email to NCBI, the authors had not brought up the journal’s editorial error, but instead cited difficulties updating their data. They also claimed that they had already submitted an updated version of the data to another website. Yet it was not until after Dr Bloom had reported the deleted data that the Wuhan authors quietly uploaded their sequences onto a database maintained by one of the authors.
The first SARS-CoV-2 genomes to be made public
In Shanghai, on the afternoon of 3 January 2020, Dr Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center received a sample taken from a patient on 26 December 2019 at the Wuhan Central Hospital (where Dr Ai and Dr Li worked). After receiving the sample, he set about sequencing the genome of the virus. Within forty hours, by 2 a.m. on 5 January, Dr Zhang had succeeded in assembling a complete genome, an extraordinary feat made possible by spectacular advances in the speed of automated DNA sequencing since the 2003 SARS outbreak. Dr Zhang could see that it was a coronavirus, related to SARS but distinct. He called the head of respiratory medicine at the Wuhan Central Hospital and warned them that they were probably dealing with a pathogen more dangerous than influenza.
That same day, Dr Zhang uploaded the novel coronavirus sequence – which would come to be one of the world’s most studied genome sequences – to the GenBank database, run by NCBI and based in the United States. The sequence was logged under the name Wuhan-Hu-1. However, the data was initially embargoed until 12 July; in other words not published for the world to see. An email from GenBank on 8 January sent to Dr Zhang’s group clearly stated: ‘You have requested that your data are to be held confidential until: July 12, 2020.’ In parallel, on 7 January 2020, Dr Zhang had submitted a paper describing the novel coronavirus genome to Nature; and in order to publish the paper he had to obtain an accession number from GenBank to show that he had uploaded the data supporting the manuscript.
One possible reason for the embargo, which was hardly in the best interests of scientific transparency or that of humanity as a whole, was apparently that the Chinese authorities were keen to keep the genome sequence and other information closely controlled as they developed testing kits for the new virus. Remember, at this stage, few people were expecting a global pandemic to develop. However, according to an investigation by the Associated Press, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention sold the rights to develop and distribute testing kits for the new virus to three little-known companies, all from Shanghai, for 1 million RMB each (roughly $150,000). GeneoDx Biotech, Huirui Biotechnology and BioGerm Medical Technology were relatively small companies, but with personal connections to CDC officials. The CDC conducted a secret evaluation of test kits on 10 January, and approved only those from the three obscure Shanghai firms. They were given exclusive rights to develop testing kits based on the genome of the virus, which was not released to other companies. Meanwhile hospitals were ordered to send samples to the CDC for testing and to get each positive test confirmed by a secondary test at a Beijing laboratory. Partly as a result of this time-consuming procedure, no new cases were confirmed between 5 and 17 January in the city, allowing the disease to explode in Wuhan and elsewhere.
By 10 January, Nature had sent Dr Zhang’s manuscript out for peer review. One of the reviewers, Dr Nick Loman from the University of Birmingham, said: ‘My initial response was to note the genome data wasn’t available.’ That same day, Dr Jeremy Farrar tweeted at both Nature and another prestigious journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (to which the Chinese CDC had submitted a similar manuscript describing a SARS-CoV-2 genome), saying, ‘If rumours of publications on the Wuhan Pneumonia situation are [sic] being prepared & submitted to @nature @NEJM are true & that critical public health information is not being shared immediately with @WHO – something is very wrong’, following up with a second tweet: ‘And if true, what are the responsibilities of the investigators, @Nature @NEJM and others? Seems clear to me.’ In Dr Farrar’s book on Covid-19, he revealed that ‘Within minutes, the tweets attracted a private message on Twitter and a phone call from the other side of the world.’ It was Dr Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, who was a co-author on the Nature paper with Dr Zhang.
Within twelve hours of Dr Farrar’s tweets, Dr Holmes had published the novel coronavirus genome on a site called Virological.org, run by Edinburgh University’s Dr Andrew Rambaut. According to accounts by Dr Holmes and Dr Zhang, at 8 a.m. on Saturday 11 January (the time zone in Sydney, Australia is half a day ahead of the UK), Dr Holmes called Dr Zhang and urged him to publish the genome. Dr Zhang deliberated on this crucial decision and called Dr Holmes back within minutes, agreeing to share the genome, which he then sent to Dr Holmes. (Although Dr Holmes was an author on the paper, he had actually not had access to the genome up until this point.) Within an hour, Dr Holmes had uploaded the genome to Virological.org, saying that he had performed this task so quickly that he did not even check the sequence before uploading. Later, Dr Zhang connected with GenBank to release the genome from embargo on 12 January. The Chinese government also released its version of the novel coronavirus genome onto a different international virus sequence database, GISAID.
The release of the novel coronavirus genome allowed other companies in China and around the world to begin developing diagnostic tests and vaccines. Using this genome sequence, in Boston, the now famous biotech firm Moderna would complete the design of an experimental messenger-RNA (mRNA) vaccine to fight the virus by Monday 13 January. This was a week before human transmission was even confirmed by the Chinese authorities and the WHO.
In publishing the sequence, Dr Zhang had broken the rules. On 1 January 2020, the Chinese National Health Commission had told the WIV’s director general, Dr Wang Yanyi (who then notified her colleagues), that the WIV could not publish any of the novel coronavirus data on social media or in the media. On 3 January, the commission also ordered all laboratories to destroy all Covid-19 samples or transfer them to designated institutions. Sure enough, Dr Zhang’s laboratory was closed for ‘rectification’ on 12 January.
The crackdown intensified across China. Documents leaked to the Associated Press showed ‘a pattern of government secrecy and top-down control’. On 24 February 2020, the Chinese CDC issued a new policy to all of its offices requiring all scientific studies relating to coronaviruses to be approved by the higher authorities in response to important instructions from Chinese President Xi Jinping. CDC staff were not allowed to ‘provide other institutions and individuals with information related to the Covid-19 epidemic on their own, including data, biological specimens, pathogens, culture, etc.’ Anyone violating these regulations would be ‘dealt with severely’.
In early April 2020, Chinese universities inadvertently published Chinese government directives that said all academic manuscripts on the novel coronavirus had to be reviewed at multiple levels, including by government officials, prior to submission to journals for publication. CNN reported that staff from the Chinese education ministry verified the directive but said that it was supposed to be an internal document, not meant to be published.
The first lockdown
On 23 January the city of Wuhan was locked down, preventing anyone from leaving. It was too late. A few days earlier, on 18 January, with the Chinese New Year holiday fast approaching, Wuhan’s mayor Zhou Xianwang had hosted a record-breaking banquet in the Baibuting district of the city, which was attended by forty thousand families. Mayor Zhou said that he had not been given sufficient warning that there was a risk. Prior to the lockdown, millions of people had already left Hubei province to visit relatives or go on holiday. As the world would soon learn, the cat was out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle, and the virus out of China. Other countries, particularly those that had suffered from the 2003 SARS outbreak, were already on the alert for the virus appearing on their shores.
As people around the world watched the drastic measures being taken in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei – emergency hospitals erected at unimaginable speed, cases forcibly isolated in special centres, fifty-six million people locked into their homes for more than two months under harsh restrictions and enforcement – they experienced a mix of envy and horror at the unchallenged power of a totalitarian state to contain a virus outbreak. Few of us realised what was in store for the world.
On 13 January, the first case of Covid-19 outside China was confirmed in Thailand: a sixty-one-year-old Chinese woman who had arrived in Bangkok on 8 January. She was a tourist from Wuhan but had not visited the Huanan seafood market. The first case in Japan was confirmed on 15 January: a man who had returned from visiting Wuhan on 6 January; his fever had started on 3 January, but he also had not visited the Huanan market. Thailand and Japan rank among the top three air travel destinations from Wuhan.
Covid-19 cases started to bubble up around the world, all tracing back to Wuhan. The first confirmed case in the United States came on 20 January in a man who had returned to Washington State five days earlier from a visit to his family in Wuhan; he too had not visited the Huanan market. The first detected cases in France came on 24 January of a Bordeaux man and a Chinese couple visiting Paris; all had recently visited Wuhan but not the Huanan market. The first reported cases in Canada and Australia were on 25 January of men who had recently visited Wuhan. The first confirmed case in Germany came on 27 January of a man who had been in a business meeting in greater Munich with a Chinese colleague who eleven days earlier had been visited in Shanghai by her parents from Wuhan. The first confirmed case in India arrived on 30 January, that of a student who had returned home to Kerala from Wuhan University. The first confirmed case in Italy came on 30 January of a tourist who had arrived from Wuhan a week before. Britain and Sweden confirmed their first cases on 31 January, both recent arrivals from Wuhan.
Rumours about a lab leak in Wuhan
Once the outbreak became public knowledge, speculation about the origin of the virus began almost immediately. On 6 February 2020, Dr Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, husband and wife scientists in Wuhan, published an online article, entitled ‘The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus’. Dr Botao Xiao was heading his own research group at the time after recently completing his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. In this article, they postulated that ‘somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus’ and that ‘in addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan’. Their reasoning was that the bat source of a closely related virus had been found in a distant Chinese province, and that the Huanan seafood market in the metropolitan city of Wuhan had no exposure to bats. The husband-and-wife team pointed to two laboratories in Wuhan that had been conducting research on bat coronaviruses: the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was close to the Huanan seafood market, and the WIV.
The city of Wuhan in Hubei province.
SleepingPanda/Alamy Stock Photo
Within a five-minute walk from the market, the Wuhan CDC ‘hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification’. Moreover, the Xiaos described how a lead researcher at this laboratory who collected bats had featured in articles and at least one broadcast video revealing that ‘he was once attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him.’ Given that ‘surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing’, relatively close to the Huanan seafood market where clusters of Covid-19 cases had been detected, it was reasonable to ask whether an accident had occurred, the two scientists argued.
The second laboratory was situated in the WIV, approximately twelve kilometres from the market. The principal investigator of this laboratory, Dr Shi Zhengli, the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the WIV, had ‘participated in a project which generated a chimeric virus using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, and reported the potential for human emergence. A direct speculation was that SARS-CoV or its derivative might leak from the laboratory.’ The online article by the Xiaos was quickly withdrawn. ‘The speculation about the possible origins in the post was based on published papers and media, and was not supported by direct proofs,’ Dr Botao Xiao wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal on 26 February.
Yet we later learned that Dr Shi had experienced the same fears and doubts, except earlier in the outbreak. An interview with Dr Shi was published in Scientific American, on 11 March 2020, describing the moment she first heard about the novel SARS coronavirus that was causing panic in Wuhan. Patient samples had been sent to the WIV on the evening of 30 December for testing. That same night, the WIV’s director general had phoned Dr Shi, instructing her to return immediately from a conference in Shanghai to investigate the atypical pneumonia cases. The Scientific American article reads: ‘“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.”’ Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals – particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, ‘Could they have come from our lab?’