Reports the content of two U.S. Embassy Beijing science-diplomacy cables (Jan and Mar 2018) sent after State Department officials visited WIV, warning Washington that the lab’s bat-coronavirus research was valuable but under-resourced, and that inadequate safety measures at the facility (which had become China’s first BSL-4-certified lab in 2017, though some of the relevant bat-CoV work was reportedly done at BSL-2) risked a “SARS-like pandemic.” Rogin quotes cable excerpts, but the cables themselves have not been independently published in full.
relevance_note: Documentary record of pre-pandemic US diplomatic concern about WIV biosafety practice, roughly two years before the outbreak; caveat that only Rogin has seen and quoted the underlying cables directly.