COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 15/04/2020
Jon Allsop
YESTERDAY, JOSH ROGIN, of the Washington Post, published a column that appeared in the paper’s Global Opinions section, but contained bombshell new reporting. Per Rogin, in early 2018, officials from the US Embassy in Beijing repeatedly visited a laboratory in Wuhan where researchers were studying coronaviruses in bats, and their possible transmissibility to humans. Embassy staff were so concerned about safety issues they said they’d observed on their visits that they sent two warnings back to the State Department, urging the US government to give the lab support. In the first of the cables, which Rogin obtained, officials warned that the lab’s work on coronaviruses “represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”