A Chinese lab leak from 2020
Exposes how China
Risks setting off another pandemic.
It’s not the lab leak you’re thinking of.
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
For years, China has aimed to lead the world in everything.
And so far, they’ve succeeded!... in shoddy construction, cheap knockoff products,
and forced organ harvesting. Must feel good to be number one.
But China also wants to lead the world in biotechnology.
It’s one of many fields of innovation that are in China’s “Made in China 2025” plan to beat the US.
They’re calling their plan “Made in China?” Oh,
because it’s gonna fall apart after a few months. Got it.
To beat the US, China has invested billions of dollars into the biotech industry.
This includes billions on biosafety labs, the facilities used to test dangerous viruses,
Like, say, coronaviruses.
The world faced a reckoning with Covid, which may or may not have leaked from a lab.
But around the same time, in 2020,
China admitted that a different disease did leak from one of their biosafety labs.
That disease was brucellosis.
It also goes by Malta fever or Mediterranean fever.
And no, Mediterranean fever isn’t when you’re really attracted to Greek people.
That’s not a disease… that’s just good taste.
In the wild, people can get brucellosis by having direct contact with infected animals,
consuming contaminated animal products,
such as unpasteurised milk or cheese, or inhaling airborne agents.
It causes flu-like symptoms, such as fevers, joint pain, headaches,
and chronic fatigue, as well as heart swelling and arthritis.
Some symptoms can become chronic and never go away, especially without early treatment.
Which sounds scary… but chronic fatigue and joint pain are also
symptoms that never go away once you turn 30. Can we get a cure for aging?
The outbreak began in Lanzhou in July of 2019.
The problem was first detected a month later in the Lanzhou Veterinary Research
Institute. At the time, 13 people working in the institute tested positive for brucellosis.
By September, the total number of infected had ballooned into thousands.
And the outbreak was first reported by Chinese state-run media in November.
Gotta love it when the CCP keeps silent on health crises until they get worse.
By the time the public was informed, “at least 10,000 people had been exposed,
with hundreds developing symptomatic illnesses.”
For some of them, the delayed treatment made symptoms chronic.
But no one knows how many were actually infected. Only 70,000 people out of some 4-plus million in
the city were tested by the end of November 2020. Of those, around 10,000 people tested positive.
Meanwhile, some students at the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute were reluctant to publicize
their symptoms. If they did, they’d risk being barred from working with animals.
Also, considering how at the same time people with
another infectious disease were locked in their homes and starved to death…
not being able to hang out with vet school animals was the least of their concerns.
At first, people thought the institute was ground zero of the infection,
since it dealt with animals. But then people who had no contact with animals got infected as well.
The disease doesn’t spread person to person, so there had to be another source.
But it wasn’t until the end of December that
people actually realized that the bacteria came from somewhere else.
The real ground zero was the Lanzhou Biopharmaceutical Plant,
a manufacturer of vaccines right in the center of Lanzhou.
“Chinese authorities found [that the] plant had used expired disinfectant in
its production of Brucella vaccines for animals between July and August
last year, and the bacteria was not eradicated in its factory exhaust.”
Expired disinfectant? Wait… cleaning supplies have an expiration date?
Does that mean in another couple of years,
we can bring back the Tide Pod challenge. Don’t worry, it’s safe now. They’re expired!
“The contaminated waste gas later formed aerosols,
which were carried by wind down to the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute”
As a result, 7 veterinary drug batches produced in the factory were canceled
and eight people deemed responsible were punished.
Years later, a Greek infectious-disease specialist described the leak as “possibly
the largest laboratory accident in the history of infectious diseases.”
The largest in history? Umm, yeah totally.
But many people didn’t listen. Probably because they were too
distracted by how handsome that Greek doctor was. Dang Mediterranean fever!
China has been passing legislation to enforce better safety practices.
Which isn’t very reassuring, since China trying to enforce
safety practices is like legislation against child endangerment drafted by
Ezra Miller. Hard to believe that’s gonna be very effective.
But we have no way of knowing whether China will
actually put safety into practice. I’ll explain why after the break.
Welcome back.
China has a history of biosafety lab leaks.
SARS was leaked at least twice.
There’s the Lanzhou leak I’ve been telling you about.
And there’s…nope can’t think of another example.
But there’s a reason for these biolab leaks: a lot of corner-cutting.
China has put biosafety to the side to focus on getting research done quickly and cheaply.
American officials have worried about this for years.
At least with cutting corners on biosafety. If a couple thousand
Chinese factory workers get maimed so they can keep producing cheap products,
then that’s A-okay in America’s book. By the way, America’s book was also made in China.
Biosecurity expert Robert Hawley told the Washington Post he was shocked “over
‘imprudent’ lab practices he observed in inspection reports… ‘It is very,
very apparent that their biological safety training is minimal,’” he said.
American officials were so concerned that a confidential State Department cable drafted in
2018 noted a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed
to safely operate [a] high-containment laboratory” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Remember when I said Covid may or may not have leaked from a lab? That’s like saying
Ezra Miller may or may not be a great stepparent.
But lack of training isn’t the only problem. The lab facilities at Wuhan,
including the highest level biosafety level-4 lab, aren’t exactly built to code.
“Although the Wuhan BSL-4 lab was built according to French designs, Chinese officials gradually
shut out their French partners and replaced some of the costlier safety features with
locally made equivalents that had never been put to the test under BSL-4 conditions.”
Which is concerning they were cost-cutting on keeping something so dangerous contained,
considering how the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were able to escape,
and John Hammond spared *no* expense.
Training and construction issues aside, the labs also just simply have bad safety practices.
We know this from records obtained by the Senate Committee on Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions and independent analysts from DRASTIC,
a loose confederation of data analysts and amateur sleuths.
For example, they published this report from an unnamed Chinese inspector in
October 2019. It says that a secure research facility at Wuhan University,
not to be confused with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had over 30 biosafety issues.
To put that in context, that’s even more than at
your local Taco Bell.
These included a lack of any laboratory-specific safety rules, a lot of debris in the laboratory,
no separation between the experiment and living areas, a lack of functioning safety
devices and alarms, the mixture of chemical and household wastes, and a whole bunch more.
Wow, that makes my college roommate Karl look positively sanitary in comparison. Compared
to that, he’s a hypochondriac. And I once saw him eat a three day-old omelet off the floor.
The labs in Wuhan are just one of many examples of China not taking biosafety seriously enough.
Even people in China admit this is a problem.
Gao Hucheng, a senior member of the National People’s Congress,
warned in a 2019 report that the “biosecurity situation in
our country is grim” and specifically warned of “laboratories that leak.”
And yet people who claimed Covid could have leaked
from a lab were told to listen to the experts. They did!!!
According to Yuan Zhiming, a deputy director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
“most laboratories lack specialized biosafety managers and engineers…mak[ing]
it difficult to identify and mitigate potential safety hazards…early enough.”
He also warned that routine maintenance costs are neglected.
You mean like how on this report from state-run CCTV, we can see Chinese
scientists being totally okay working with bats and other animals with minimal protective gear
Or even none?
I think China needs more than just biosafety managers, engineers, and funds. They need
more common sense. And probably more hand soap. Preferably some that arne’t expired.
It’s also worth noting how Chinese labs are totally okay with testing viruses below the
appropriate biosafety level, as was the case at the Wuhan institute of virology.
But the most widely cited biosafety issues in
China involve flaws in handling hazardous laboratory wastes.
And when I say “handling,” I’m apparently being literal.
Ugh. Are they trying to get bitten and become
Morbius? This is not what he meant when he said it's Morbin’ time.
This isn’t really a surprise given how bad China is with any wastes in general.
In a 2018 report, for example, “an official in China’s southern Guangzhou region noted
that ‘laboratory wastewater is being directly released’ into sewage systems”
and described how lab workers failed to properly clean up lab cultures.
It’s a problem that the director of the pathogen biology department at
Wuhan University said is a problem all over China.
So yes, China has passed legislation to improve biosafety.
But as long as the CCP is in control,
China will always fall behind the West when it comes to safety practices.
That’s because the entire system is built on a secretive,
top-down bureaucracy that forces goals to be met at any cost,
all while reflexively covering up accidents and discouraging leaders from admitting mistakes.
As long as that continues,
then there’s always going to be a risk that China causes the next pandemic.
But
on the bright side, causing pandemics is something else they get to brag they lead the world in.
And as always, this show would not exist without support from viewers like you,
on Locals. That’s chinauncensored.locals.com
They’re what I call the China Uncensored 50 Cent Army. For a small monthly contribution,
they get to chat with Matt, Shelley, and I on our exclusive Locals social media platform.
And as an additional thank you, I answer their questions at the end of each episode.
Today’s question comes from man_of_leisure
“Are there any updates on what that incident at the Peoples Congress was about with Hu Jintao?
At the time it looked like a purge, but he has since made an appearance
at Jiang Zemin's funeral. Has he indeed been purged/arrested/snuggled to death by Pandas?”
Great question.
So as I’m sure many of you remember, at the latest National People’s Congress in October,
former Chinese leader Hu Jintao was rather unceremoniously hauled off.
People were, a little confused to say the least.
We did a full episode about that, so you should check it out. I’ll put a link below.
So we kind of broke from the mainstream analysis. We don’t think it was necessarily a purge. We go
into a lot of detail about why in that episode, but it seems like we were correct in our analysis.
Chinese state-run media showed Hu Jintao prominently at the Party
Congress on the evening news. If Hu had really been purged, he wouldn’t be there.
He’s also been seen in public since. For example,
in December, at a public memorial for former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin.
So at the very least, what happened with Hu Jintao is very atypical of
the way Xi Jinping usually purges his enemies.
Thanks for your question and your support man of leisure.
And thank you for watching.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.