‘BIGGER STINK’

U.S. Diplomat Who Warned About Wuhan Lab Years Ago: I Should’ve Done More

One of the U.S. diplomats who visited the prominent Chinese virology lab in 2017 has some regrets.

Back in 2017, years before the coronavirus pandemic upended normal life around the globe, U.S. embassy officials visited the bioscience laboratory in Wuhan, China—and what they saw caused so much concern that they sent two warnings back to Washington. Writing for Politico, columnist Josh Rogin adds more detail to the warnings that he first disclosed last year. According to Rogin, the cables warned the government of “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” Four years on, and following allegations from President Trump’s State Department that implied the lab was involved in the pandemic’s origins, one of those unnamed diplomats has said they wished that they had done more. “We were trying to warn that that lab was a serious danger,” they said. “I thought it would be maybe a SARS-like outbreak again. If I knew it would turn out to be the greatest pandemic in human history, I would have made a bigger stink about it.”