Report: The US Had Warned a Wuhan Lab of a Viral Outbreak Back in 2018

A Washington Post report published yesterday made a bombshell revelation regarding two official US warnings back from 2018, in which American officials reported a lack of safety measures in Chinese research facilities.

According to the report by the paper's Josh Rogin, State Department officials had noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting risky coronavirus studies, focusing on viruses originating in bats.

The report described the research facilities' safety measures as "inadequate" and linked its experiments to the possibility of triggering the current COVID-19 pandemic. 

Rogin states that US officials have sent warnings "that the lab’s work, on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission, represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic".

He also mentions the head of the research project Shi Zhengli, who "has been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years," saying that he and his team had found evidence of a coronaviruses ability to become transmitted among humans".

The writer concludes; while there is no evidence supporting conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was intentionally designed to plague the world as we witness today, such information does point to the likelihood that it originated in a scientific lab rather than having evolved naturally in a wet market. 

"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", Rogin adds.

The report's final notes touch on the probability of labeling these claims as " a conspiracy theory" but also that it calls for an investigation to ensure such a pandemic can be prevented in the future."