The WaPo on WIV

Speaking of news about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, I thought this piece by Eva Dou, Pei Lin Wu, Quentin Aries and Rebecca Tan in the Washington Post on the history of the WIV was very interesting:

One chilly morning in February 2017, a tall Chinese scientist in his 50s named Yuan Zhiming showed Bernard Cazeneuve, then the French prime minister, around Wuhan’s new high-security pathogen lab.

Built with French engineering, it was China’s first P4 lab, one of several dozen in the world with that highest security designation. Yuan, the director of the lab, had worked more than a decade to make it a reality.

Yuan and his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) hoped they could help prevent another catastrophe like the SARS outbreak in 2003, which embarrassed Beijing and resulted in the dismissal of the health minister.

But just a couple of years after the P4 lab’s ribbon-cutting, China was engulfed in a far deadlier outbreak. Yuan’s team hadn’t prevented it. And worse, some suspected they might have been involved in its genesis.

Here’s a telling quote:

“Scientific collaboration in virology — it’s gone,” said a foreign researcher who has worked for years with the WIV and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the hostile political climate. “Now, the Chinese will not welcome foreigners because their view is you’re coming in to dig dirt.”

and its conclusion:

Yuan and Shi have retreated from the world amid the controversy. The “comprehensive news” section of the WIV’s website once highlighted international collaborations, but has dwindled to politically correct posts about researchers studying the speeches of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Nielsen-LeRoux said she last heard from Yuan in March 2020, toward the end of the Wuhan lockdown.

“We had a very hard time in combating the infection in Wuhan,” Yuan wrote to her in an email. “The virus is spreading in your country, and more people are infected during the last days, and the situation worries me a lot. I am confident that we could finally curb the spreading of the virus with our joint effort, and our life will return back to normal soon.”

Perhaps I’m mistaken but reading between the lines of the piece, it seems to me that the Chinese authorities have a deep-seated inferiority complex and they too have their own facts.