First, the Chinese government has not behaved like an innocent victim. Instead, it has acted consistently as if it’s covering up a terrible secret in Wuhan. In December 2019, the WIV’s infamous bat expert, Dr. Shi Zhengli, deleted data and purged phrases such as “wild animal samples,” “cross-species infection,” and “emerging infectious diseases” from institute databases. The next month, the Chinese government installed its top military epidemiologist at the WIV, putting it under the control of the People’s Liberation Army. Last February, Chairman Xi Jinping announced that China would fast-track legislation to reform the nation’s biosecurity laws. Chapter Five of that law addresses “biosafety of pathogenic microorganism laboratories” — in other words, lab leaks. And the Chinese government purged hundreds of studies relating to bat-coronavirus research, including research by Dr. Shi. We’ve also learned more about the U.S. government’s concerns about the Wuhan lab. Last year, journalist Josh Rogin reported on State Department warnings from 2018 about lax safety standards and a shortage of trained personnel at the WIV. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal disclosed an intelligence report stating that three researchers there went to the hospital with coronavirus-like symptoms in November 2019 — one month before the first confirmed case. Further, the inability to find the host species in nature is a dog that hasn’t barked. It took only four months to find the host for SARS, and nine months for MERS. Yet more than 15 months on, Beijing hasn’t identified the host species for this coronavirus — something for which they’ve surely searched high and low.