Assuming the Worst

I didn’t want Mike Pompeo and Miles Yu’s Wall Street Journal op-ed go by without comment. In it, contrary to the World Health Organization task force’s findings, they take it as a given that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s labs:

The evidence that the virus came from Wuhan is enormous, though largely circumstantial, and most signs point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, as the source of Covid-19. In America, concern about the site is now broad and bipartisan. The Biden administration stated that it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the early days of the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with the investigators’ work.

The world has known for a long time that WIV poses a huge risk to global health. Two 2018 State Department cables warned of its biosafety problems. They even predicted that SARS-CoV-2’s ACE2 receptor, identified by WIV scientists, would enable human-to-human transmission. Yuan Zhiming, then director of WIV’s biosafety level 4 lab, warned, “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edge sword: It can be used for the benefit of humanity, but can also lead to a disaster.” He listed the shortfalls prevalent among China’s biology labs, including a lack of “operational technical support, professional instructions” and “feasible standards for the safety requirements of different protection zones and for the inoculation of microbiological animals and equipment.”

The Chinese public took note, with several bloggers alleging that WIV’s virus-carrying animals are sold as pets. They may even show up at local wet markets. After the Wuhan outbreak, one since-disappeared blogger asked a WIV researcher to debate the lab’s biosafety practices in public. The offer was ignored.

and

The Chinese Communist Party’s recklessness has already cost the world too much, and its obfuscation guarantees this won’t be the last such tragedy. It ordered the destruction of virus samples collected from the earliest patients. It banned the release of key data. It silenced journalists, doctors and scientists. And it impeded the WHO’s investigation. Beijing doesn’t want the world to know the true origin of the coronavirus and its serious biosafety lapses.

The Chinese government must change course. It must be open about its biosafety systems, fix its errors and curtail its dangerous ambitions. Lives and livelihoods across the world are on the line. We all have a responsibility to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party isn’t given a free pass.

I thought that the WHO task force’s dismissal of the WIV lab out of hand as a possible source on the grounds that it appeared to be well-run beggared credulity but tying the virus to the lab as Mssrs. Pompeo and Yu do, is excessive. The truth is that we don’t know where the virus came from and in all likelihood we’ll never know. The ruling Chinese regime has all but guaranteed that.

IMO China’s opacity is enough reason that we should be maintaining a much more at-arm’s-length relationship with China than we do. Do we need to add assumptions of perfidy to that?