In January 2018, two years before the novel coronavirus swept around the globe from China, U.S. embassy officials took the unusual step of visiting a bioscience laboratory in Wuhan—and what they saw caused so much concern that they reportedly sent two official warnings back to Washington. Columnist Josh Rogin of The Washington Post has obtained one leaked cable that reportedly complains about safety and management weaknesses at the lab, and specifically flags concerns that its work on bat coronaviruses could be dangerous. Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, said: “The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected.” There is no evidence that the novel coronavirus was engineered, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that it may have originated in the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals. “The cable was a warning shot,” one unnamed U.S. official told the newspaper. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”
