Covid-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside Wuhan Lab

If Xi was involved from nearly day 1 then you have to assume the Chinese intel agencies were also involved since Nov 2019. Meaning there was total and thorough information control. Including potentially which hospital cases became public to researchers and when.

> … we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

> …[we] separately got three experts on CCP communications to review the WIV meeting summary. All agreed that it appeared to be urgent, nonroutine and related to some sort of biosafety emergency. Two also agreed that it appeared Xi himself had issued a pishi.

> A former senior U.S. intelligence official said that, while the pishi [link, AT] in the dispatch is not necessarily a smoking gun, he reads it as saying that “there is some issue related to lab security, which doesn’t come up very often, that needed to be seen by Xi Jinping.” He added, “Something signed off on by the General Secretary (Xi) and Premier (Li) is high priority.”

Of course controlling all information is always difficult, especially when early reports are going to be vague flu-like symptoms. But given the information environment in such a situation it’s difficult to trust any raw information after that point if a) the lab did in fact have a serious bio safety incident and b) the highest echelons of the Chinese gov were involved well before reports start surfacing in the food market.

> Ordinarily, ProPublica has a sterling record

Don't forget Vanity Fair while you're throwing stuff under the bus. They were involved in this as well.

This reminds me of Zhores Medvedev's analysis in the 1970's of Soviet scientific research into the effects of severe nuclear contamination. By compiling open papers from the Soviet Union that involved contamination research that could only have been performed on large populations of wildlife over a vast area Medvedev showed that a very large nuclear incident had occurred in the Urals in 1957, the so-called Kyshtym disaster. The large scale of the populations involved and the geographic scope of the research were lost on Soviet censors, and so the evidence accumulated over time in open papers.

Years later the Soviets admitted the major elements of the event, vindicating Medvedev. The Great and The Good of Western nuclear science had previously maligned him as a misinformation spreading crackpot. Because of course they would.