The lab that has been assiduously and energetically collecting coronaviruses from horseshoe bats for more than a decade, gathering a far larger collection of samples and genetic sequences than any other lab anywhere in the world, just happens to be in Wuhan, as part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Run by Dr Shi Zhengli, it boasted in 2019 of having at least 100 different Sars-like viruses in its database. We cannot check these samples because the database went offline on September 12, 2019, just before the pandemic began, and Dr Shi persistently refuses to reopen it, arguing that it’s been subject to ‘hacking attempts’. Right… in September 2019? And there’s no other way to show the data? Dr Daszak says he knows what is in the database and that it is of no relevance, which is why he has not asked his friend Dr Shi to share it. Right. When I raised this lack of transparency with a senior British scientist, he said: ‘They are communists, what do you expect?’ It is not clear why that should be reassuring. The purpose of all these virus hunts and experiments was to predict and avert the next pandemic. At best they failed in that; at worst they might have caused it. It is still possible that somebody got COVID through an animal in a market, which had been infected by a bat. But in the case of the Sars epidemic of 2002-03, it was just a few weeks before scientists figured out that food handlers were catching it from infected palm civets on sale in markets in Guangdong province. And that was before modern high-speed genomic sequencing was invented. Today, with better technology and after 18 months of searching, Chinese authorities have tested north of 80,000 animals in markets, on farms and in the wild all across China and found precisely zero that are or were carrying SARS-CoV-2 (not counting cats, mink and so on which caught it from people once the pandemic was under way). The virus found in two pangolins in 2019 is a dead end: too distantly related, nowhere near Wuhan, and none of the pangolin handlers got sick.