This one's for you, mk
Dollars to donuts, that's what happened. There are so many crumbs on that trail. I was just getting started here: It doesn't make sense that it is from pangolin-CoV when it's far more similar to the bat virus RaTG13. Occam's Razor says they were inserting the ACE2 binding sequence and testing for gain-of-function in experiments similar to many before. It was done in a BSL2 lab when it should have been BSL4, and someone caught it.“The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.
Oh geez. This from Zhengli in 2010: "Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) proteins of different bat species confer variable susceptibility to SARS-CoV entry" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7086629/| b_b you should check out this rabbithole...ACE2 from M. daubentoni was chosen to generate a series of ACE2 mutants using a QuikChange II Site-Directed Mutagenesis Kit (Stratagene, USA).
Here's another one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/...Second, as predicted, sequence variation in the N-terminal region of the SL-CoV S protein rendered it incapable of using ACE2 as a receptor for cell entry. However, the ACE2-binding activity of SL-CoVs was easily acquired by the replacement of a relatively small sequence segment of the S protein from the SARS-CoV S sequence, highlighting the potential dangers posed by this diverse group of viruses in bats. It is now well documented that bat species, including horseshoe bats, can be infected by different CoVs. Coinfection by different CoVs in an individual bat has also been observed (26, 29, 39). Knowing the capability of different CoVs to recombine both in the laboratory (2, 14, 15, 32) and in nature (22, 41, 44), the possibility that SL-CoVs may gain the ability to infect human cells by acquiring S sequences competent for binding to ACE2 or other surface proteins of human cells can be readily envisaged.
I can't really process this right now. I think this information is so toxic that my brain is rejecting it or something. It makes complete and total sense, and yet I can't believe it. I think I'm in shock. If this is true, there's no price anyone can pay to fix it .
On the one hand, I really don't want it to be true. On the other hand, I'd rather have it be a lab mistake than some random mutation, as the former is at least something that can be reduced in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to a moratorium on types research of some kind. I mean, this has been the nightmare scenario for gene research, too.
I disagree. For this mutation to occur naturally may have taken millennia or longer, perhaps infinity. There's an aspect here of (to borrow from Silicon Valley's brilliant ending) 4 minute mile-ism. It was considered impossible until it wasn't, and then it was routine. Now that this thing is out there, it could be routine insofar as the mutation barrier is super low now. It just needs to mutate enough to evade whatever the eventual vaccine is, and we're fucked over and over. The large energy well has been overcome by tinkering, so it's possible only small ones remain. Hopefully the other side of that coin is that it weakens over time, a la the flu and other coronaviruses. But maybe not. We don't know the behavior of partially unnatural/chimeric viruses in the wild. I think if this is true it's a worst case scenario. China may have to be isolated from the international community. There's no punishment that fits the crime here, but it is a crime against humanity (again, if true). Acts of God sort of have to be accepted, even if grudgingly. And as bad as evil is, at least there's a logic that can be countered. But outright negligence when playing with nukes is intolerable, unforgivable, and warrants the strongest possible sanction.
This is probably the worst paragraph I've read in weeks, thanks. An ability to mutate quickly/often might explain why some are testing positive and/or even relapsing weeks after triumphing over some version of covid-19. We should have better stats on that in just a few weeks. "should"
How quickly can we sequence a mutated covid and develop a new vaccine? How do mutations in covid correlate with ease of developing an updated vaccine, i.e. is the previous vaccine a good starting point? Will it take a year to respond to each annual mutation, rendering vaccines almost useless? Presumably, there exist people with experience developing annual vaccines for influenza? These are all rhetorical questions that I'm shouting into the e-wind, no worries.
I think it depends a lot on immunology, which we don't have a good handle on yet (and won't for some time). The reason you can keep getting the same cold over and over is that the disease is mild and doesn't evoke a strong antibody response, so many people lose their immunity in a few years. Colds, as we've all learned, are coronaviruses. So that's ok the bad ledger. But I've read that SARS left people with strong immunity for 10 years or more, so that's in the good ledger. Hopefully because of the severity of SARS2, we'll also see strong antibodies in lots of people. That will lower the vaccine barrier a lot.
'bl00 is right, it's anecdata. But, as you know, that'd be our first clue that covid-19 joins the common cold and influenza in the list of "seasonal mutations we have to worry about". If it's possible that covid-19 could mutate into a much deadlier form, I better start taking more psychedelics ASAP. Milk my time on Earth for all it's worth, and get on better terms with the grim reaper.
Important research doesn't absolve anyone of responsible conduct. I'm sitting in a lab right now stressing the fuck out about making a human use product perfect, because I don't want to risk giving one already really sick and likely to die person sepsis. IT LITERALLY KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT. If the consequence were global catastrophe instead of killing someone a week quicker than they were already dying, I like to hope I'd consider that pretty heavily.
Having grown up with megadeath, there's a set of mental gymnastics you can perform to keep your psyche limber enough for genocide. You start with some othering and follow it up with a heapin' helpin' of just-following-ordersism. You can also do some patriotism stretches whereby anything you do to increase your prowess on the battlefield is saving the lives of the only people who matter. The Chinese have always been the only people who matter. This is why the Opium Wars still scar their collective psyche: it was the first time in history that The Chosen Ones had their asses handed to them and everyone, from Chiang Kai-shek onwards, has based their foreign policy on the urgent and inevitable correction of the celestial order.
I don't think we're disagreeing much or at all - I may have misused 'on the other hand'. I totally agree that this is a horrible, terrible, history-defining capital-B Bad Thing if it's confirmed to be true. And I probably don't grasp the consequences nearly as well as you do. But just a week or two ago, there was a discussion about the mutation rate of coronaviruses and that covid-19 may be an indication of a slow natural process happing faster than expected. And part of me is vaguely...relieved? if it turns out to be human error instead of a future of dozens if not hundreds of new coronaviruses popping up. Despite it still being a terrible thing that has happened. I mean - at least have tools to kneecap further clearly-a-bad-idea-in-hindsight-research. We can exercise agency. Unless I'm completely missing what you mean here, this is exactly my point too. I wasn't dismissing the gravity of the neglience in any way.And as bad as evil is, at least there's a logic that can be countered.
Let me restate that you are correct that human error would be a better cause if and only if we can contain and kill the thing. That's a big if. But in that case, we can presumably put the genie back in the bottle and design and adhere to international safety standards going forward. My fear is that we have created something unkillable. Time will tell, to use a banality.
I guess something like that. Obviously it's a bit early to be talking in those terms, since we don't even have good testing, let alone a vaccine. At least if we had testing, we could probably use convalescent serum (antibodies from patients who are recovered), and it might confer some immunity. That's under testing right now, but I don't have a lot of faith even in that, because to do that properly you need to be able to titrate the dose. That's impossible without relatively precise serology. I keep reading that it's going to be online "next week" and then that week comes and goes with nothing to show.
I'm with b_b. There are plenty of bad places that nature could go eventually that we can quickly. I've been reading a number of these articles, and in the simplest terms, researchers have been asking questions like: "Can I make a bat virus infect human cells if I do this?", then trying it, and publishing their results. Sometimes the changes are specific and intentional, but in many cases, the scientists are driving the viruses to evolve in animals or in culture in artificial conditions. One can appreciate how this research can be elucidating, but one can also appreciate how this research could create conditions that needn't elucidation prior to them being artificially constructed.
But Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, says that gain-of-function studies “have done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics — yet they risked creating an accidental pandemic”. He argues that such experiments should not happen at all.
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic. “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.) The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003. “Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.” The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments. As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. “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,” he said. There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved. Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems. “The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.” No extra assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and relations with China. Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan. “The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said. As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared. On Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus. The origin story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one. The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus, said Xiao. We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, but the cable pointed to the danger there and increases the impetus to find out, he said. “I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,” he said. “To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.” |Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
Well fuck me. Ok, so China didn't release the virus maliciously, but it was clearly from their lab... in WUHAN. "...the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats..."
mk has been pretty insistent on tinfoiling this one. My argument was that any decent bioweapons lab worth their salt wouldn't bother fucking around with something as dumb as SARS because its lethality isn't worth bothing with. His argument, which has slowly worn me down, is that there's ample evidence that the chinese have been fucking around with SARS on the reg because Chinese researchers are just sorta fundamentally reckless. The argument put forth by Richard Preston in The Hot Zone is that Ebola lived into a cave until people started wandering further and further into the jungle. Jumping from animals, then, is just what viruses do. The argument put forth by Ken Alibek in Biohazard is that a few hundred people died in Sverdlovsk because a technician put up a post-it note saying "filters dirty, took out to clean, don't turn on exhaust fan" and the glue on the back of it wasn't sticky enough to keep it from falling to the floor. Jesse Gelsinger died because the gene therapy he was testing used an adenovirus that he already had immunity to. I know a guy who wrote his Ph.D on a solution to this: use filovirus instead of adenovirus. To no one's surprise USAMRIID hired him outta college. He's told me stories of walking around Vozrozhdenia Island and scraping weapons-grade anthrax out of the dirt because when they were testing, there was an ocean between the beach and the biotoxins. Really, I want to believe this wasn't anyone's fault. There have been so.many.examples of this shit going totally fucking wrong and virtually none of it going right. But that desire is growing increasingly difficult to satisfy.
To be clear, there's ample evidence that the international scientific community have been mutating these viruses, and playing with the products for the last decade. However, scientists in China have been doing so under conditions that make a leak more likely.His argument, which has slowly worn me down, is that there's ample evidence that the chinese have been fucking around with SARS on the reg because Chinese researchers are just sorta fundamentally reckless.
There's a probability problem here that I think confounds a lot of people. That is that given enough time, an unlikely event becomes inevitable. So the question is obviously what's the likelihood of something going wrong in a given year? For even a well-run BSL-4 lab, that's a hotly debated question, and estimates vary by orders of magnitude. If, say, the probability of a leak occurring is 1/1000, then the chance of a leak occurring in 10 years (assuming equal weights, when in reality the chance probably goes up as equipment ages), is simply 1 - (1 - 1/1000)^10 = 0.01. One percent isn't great, but maybe it's tolerable depending how bad the agent is. But if the odds are 1/100, then the chance of a leak in 10 years is 9.6%, which is really bad. Now let's suppose the lab isn't being operated at maximum safety, and the odds shift from 99.9% safe to 95% safe. In that case, in 10 years there's a 40% chance of a leak. Basically, we're fucked type of territory. These calculations require 3rd grade math once you know the a priori odds, which are probably unknowable, and therefore should be assumed to be a lot likelier than you think. I don't know that most people think in those terms, but they should. In the linked article, they're contemplating what would happen if hoof and mouth disease got out and the livestock industry was fucked. Here, we're talking about causing Great Depression II. I just can't believe anyone would be that fucking consciousless.
You are now aware that USAMRIID managed to leak a bunch of anthrax into the water table of Frederick, Maryland.The problems date back to May 2018, when storms flooded and ruined a decades-old steam sterilization plant that the institute had been using to treat wastewater from its labs, Ms. Vander Linden said. The damage halted research for months, until the institute developed a new decontamination system using chemicals.
And these are the same dumb fucks who tell you every time they build another BSL-4 lab that the risk of a leak is negligible. There's a BSL-4 lab in downtown fucking Boston that I'm sure the citizens of that city are happy they don't know exists. I'm all for scientific exploration, but we need an ethical guide or else what't the point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island Wanna get rid of anthrax? You literally need to blowtorch the top six inches of topsoil and then soak it with 280 metric tons of formaldehyde.Artificial contamination of Gruinard Island off the northwest coast of Scotland occurred in 1942–1943 as a result of tests of a biological warfare bomb containing live anthrax spores. Even by 1979 spores could still be detected in a 3-hectare area of the island. In the 1980s the area was decontaminated by burning the vegetation and spraying with 5% formaldehyde in seawater. By 1987, the ground was declared anthrax-free and, after reseeding, sheep were able to graze safely.
Paywalled. :/ Nevermind. I got it. https://www.pwbreaker.com/
Dude the WaPo is like $20 a year or some shit In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet. Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic. “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.) The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003. Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access. “Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.” The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments. As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. “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,” he said. There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. That’s important because the Chinese government still refuses to answer basic questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus while suppressing any attempts to examine whether either lab was involved. Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses. The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems. “The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.” No extra assistance to the labs was provided by the U.S. government in response to these cables. The cables began to circulate again inside the administration over the past two months as officials debated whether the lab could be the origin of the pandemic and what the implications would be for the U.S. pandemic response and relations with China. Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan. “The idea that is was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said. As my colleague David Ignatius noted, the Chinese government’s original story — that the virus emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan — is shaky. Research by Chinese experts published in the Lancet in January showed the first known patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no connection to the market, nor did more than one-third of the cases in the first large cluster. Also, the market didn’t sell bats. The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us. Shi and other WIV researchers have categorically denied this lab was the origin for the novel coronavirus. On Feb. 3, her team was the first to publicly report the virus known as 2019-nCoV was a bat-derived coronavirus. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has put a total lockdown on information related to the virus origins. Beijing has yet to provide U.S. experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab that published the novel coronavirus genome on Jan. 11 was quickly shut down by authorities for “rectification.” Several of the doctors and journalists who reported on the spread early on have disappeared. On Feb. 14, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a new biosecurity law to be accelerated. On Wednesday, CNN reported the Chinese government has placed severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus. The origin story is not just about blame. It’s crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one. The Chinese government must be transparent and answer the questions about the Wuhan labs because they are vital to our scientific understanding of the virus, said Xiao. We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, but the cable pointed to the danger there and increases the impetus to find out, he said. “I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,” he said. “To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.”Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.