Yesterday, Republicans on the Senate HELP Committee released a report concluding that the most likely origin of COVID-19 was as the result of a lab leak. Today, ProPublica has a new report based on five months of work looking into what the committee was investigating. The focus is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab at the center of the suspicion about Covid’s origin. What the ProPublica story confirms is that in November 2019 the WIV was a “biocomplex in crisis.”

The insights in the story are the result of 15 months of investigation by the team behind the Senate HELP Committee report. One of the people on the team was Toy Reid, a man who worked for the RAND Corporation and for the State Department. Reid speaks several languages including Japanese and Chinese and is said to have mastered the subtle art of “party speak” the way that Chinese apparatchiks write their reports to avoid directly mentioning anything that might cause someone to lose face.

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight…

Like many scientific institutes in China, the WIV is state-run and funded. The research carried out there must advance the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As one way to ensure compliance, the CCP operates 16 party branches inside of the WIV, where members including scientists meet regularly and demonstrate their loyalty.

Week after week, scientists from those branches chronicled their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV’s website. These dispatches, intended for watchful higher-ups, generally consist of upbeat recitations of recruitment efforts and meeting summaries that emphasize the fulfillment of Beijing’s political goals. “The headlines and initial paragraphs seem completely innocuous,” Reid says. “If you didn’t take a close look, you’d probably think there’s nothing in here.”

But scrolling through these seemingly innocuous reports, Reid noticed a change of tone in the fall of 2019:

…in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.

once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.

Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above? Reading between the lines, Reid concluded, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”

And that, in fact, is exactly what happened next, according to a meeting summary uploaded nine days later.

The messenger who arrived at the WIV was Dr. Ji Changzheng, the “technology safety and security director for the Chinese Academy of Sciences.” He came with a message from Xi Jiinping.

The WIV’s deputy director of safety and security spoke next, summarizing “several general problems that were found over the course of the last year during safety and security investigations, and [he] pointed to the severe consequences that could result from hidden safety dangers.”

But what drew Reid’s full attention was the word Ji used to describe the important “written instructions” he was relaying from Beijing: “pishi.” When China’s senior leaders receive written reports on a worrying or important issue, they will write instructions in the margins, known as pishi, to be carried out swiftly by lower-level officials. As Reid interpreted it, the pishi that Ji arrived with that day appeared to have come directly from Xi, arguably China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. To Reid, it suggested that Xi himself had been briefed on an ongoing crisis at the WIV.

To verify that Dr. Ji wasn’t just name dropping, Reid looked at nine other routine visits he had made to other facilities prior to the visit to the WIV. In none of those cases did he mention a “pishi” suggesting that the WIV visit was more serious. But here’s what may be the killer paragraph in this story:

Vanity Fair and ProPublica examined research from Chinese academics on pishi and separately got three experts on CCP communications to review the WIV meeting summary. All agreed that it appeared to be urgent, nonroutine and related to some sort of biosafety emergency. Two also agreed that it appeared Xi himself had issued a pishi…

Another longtime CCP analyst said it was not possible to conclude from the document that Xi and Li had actually issued a pishi related to a specific incident, or even that they had been informed of one. Ji, in her view, might well have been invoking their names without their knowledge to underscore the importance of his message. However, she said that, given the party’s preference for positive communications, the acknowledgment of a “‘complex and grave situation’ means ‘We are facing something really bad.’” She also said that the language of the summary implied that the situation in question was happening at that time.

So there was a serious security issue at the WIV in November 2019, serious enough for a special visit and maybe even a direct message from Xi Jinping. And there’s more. One of the issues mentioned in the report released yesterday was just how quickly Chinese scientists were able to work up a vaccine.

The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.

There’s also computer evidence suggesting an attempt to republish all of the material on the WIV website in November 2019:

Vanity Fair and ProPublica analyzed the WIV website and found that there may have been an after-the-fact attempt to reframe the events of November 2019. On Nov. 11, the WIV appeared to republish the entire section of its website containing institutional and party branch news. Every dispatch from prior dates, even those from several years earlier, contains underlying data that indicates that it was changed on that day.

Was this routine or was it an attempt to clean things up in advance of Dr. Ji’s visit six days later?

When I wrote about the report yesterday I found the contents not terribly convincing because they lacked the kind of detail contained in this ProPublica report. Having read the ProPublica story, this does seem to be a pretty major advance in what we know. Specifically, something bad happened at the WIV in the fall of 2019, probably a biosafety emergency and the government was worried about it. If it had nothing to do with the coronavirus the timing would be one hell of a coincidence.