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The episode underscores once again why a serious investigation is needed to get to the bottom of how the pandemic began. The morning of Dec. 26, 2019, began as usual at Vision Medicals in Guangzhou in southern China. This commercial laboratory, a private start-up barely a year and a half old, was also known by its Chinese name, Weiyuan Gene Technology. It specialized in next-generation sequencing, called mNGS, and offered applications that can identify most infectious agents — viruses, bacteria and others — in a single test. A researcher browsed through the latest test results, as she did every day, before turning to her other work. She was proud of the laboratory’s metagenomic sequencing capabilities. Only a month before, her company played a key role in quickly detecting a plague outbreak in Beijing. The previous day, her laboratory had received a bronchoalveolar lavage fluid sample from Wuhan, a city of 11 million people and a major transportation hub, where a 65-year-old man was hospitalized with a pneumonia-like respiratory ailment. When she checked the test results that morning, they indicated the man was infected by a virus similar to the one that causes SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, which was first identified in China in 2002 and ultimately killed 774 people worldwide. The researcher was alarmed. She wrote to a co-worker on WeChat, a messaging service, at 9:28 a.m., saying the sample was brimming with something that looked like SARS.
The co-worker wrote back, recalling the Beijing plague outbreak they had worked on together
This exchange took place 28 days before Wuhan was locked down because of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. In late December and early January, a number of researchers and the Chinese government were aware the virus could spread rapidly, but the truth was kept from the public. In those weeks, the virus exploded, leading to a pandemic that has killed more than 6 million people, by official tally. The actual toll is probably twice as many, or more. The researcher went by the online moniker Little Mountain Dog, with an avatar of a furry pup sitting alone in a field of lush grass. Her reflections and observations were posted in a blog on Jan. 28, 2020, which she took down two days later, saying it was written “for myself to read in the future, but it spread online and I didn’t want to get involved in anything, so I deleted it.” She asked that no one reprint it, and said the company’s leaders were “understanding and forgiving” after she posted it. “I don’t want to cause trouble to anyone, and I don’t want to stir up public opinion,” she added. At the time, her posts were quoted in news accounts online, including by the magazine Caixin, which published a detailed article, then took down parts of it. “I have to admire the reporters from Caixin.com, who dug up so much accurate information from the messy information in the early days,” she later wrote. Recently, the research group DRASTIC, which has been probing the pandemic’s origins, retrieved and translated her blog posts, including attached screenshots of WeChat messages.
The research group has withheld her real name, and we agreed to do so as well to protect her privacy. It provided her email and we sent a request for comment, but got no response. The company also did not respond. Her story points to a coverup with tragic consequences of historic proportion. A severe danger was concealed until it was too late. It came about because of a culture that prioritizes political stability at any cost, extraordinary state secrecy, and missteps by public health officials who did not speak out. The episode serves to underscore once again why a serious investigation is needed to get to the bottom of how the pandemic began. The virus’s origins might have been caused by a zoonotic spillover, a bat coronavirus jumping to humans, possibly with an intermediate host. Or it might have been an inadvertent leak from a laboratory in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses. Only by learning what really transpired can we reach any conclusions about how to prevent it from happening again. China could go a long way toward finding the answers, but instead it has slammed the door on further inquiry....
