A New Piece of the Puzzle of Covid’s Origin

Nearly seven years ago, the world was about to awaken to the fact that a novel pneumonia from Wuhan, China, was becoming the most disruptive global event in living memory. The intervening years have produced significant scientific understanding about this event, but not complete transparency. Key facts have surfaced slowly, and increasingly not at all, impeded by the passage of time and the protective layers of China’s bureaucracy.

What follows is an account of events that preceded the outbreak and that have been overlooked in official records. These events don’t directly explain how Covid-19 began. They don’t establish a laboratory origin. But they show that Wuhan’s laboratories, some of which were performing dangerous virological research in 2019, were operating at the time under considerable strain, as the region’s waste disposal infrastructure experienced a number of significant failures.

For more than two decades, I served as a rapporteur for the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, or ProMED-mail, the world’s leading early warning system for infectious diseases. In that capacity I reported on hundreds of disease events, many in China, and was recognized with an award for early reporting on SARS in 2003. The work demanded close, sustained attention to the public record and media reports in a place where official communication is, characteristically, opaque. I applied those same research skills here to examine the months preceding the emergence of Covid-19 in Wuhan.

The sources underlying this account are all public, though some are confined to relatively remote corners of the Chinese Internet. Local research institutions placed a substantial amount of information in the public domain, including public tenders, procurement contracts, and a formal institutional acknowledgment of regulatory non-compliance. Newspaper reports and government announcements documented disasters at key nodes of the province’s laboratory waste disposal network. And field research that clearly breached the customary safety boundaries of a community health laboratory was not merely described but celebrated in state media.

These sources were there for the finding. There is no sign that the Chinese government attempted to suppress or conceal them. Rather, it appears that those tasked with understanding the origins of the greatest pandemic in over a century simply failed to probe the available record, taking superficial accounts as complete, or seeking data that would confirm suppositions already formed.

Lost in the process was the foundational principle that the most consequential scientific questions demand the most rigorous pursuit of evidence. What caused the Covid pandemic is one of those questions.

At about 7:20 a.m. on May 12, 2019, black smoke rose above the eastern industrial belt of Wuhan. Two warehouses at Wuhan Beihu Yunfeng Environmental Protection were being destroyed by fire.

Yunfeng was obscure outside industry circles, but within Wuhan’s research infrastructure it served a critical function. Chinese law in 2019 classified hazardous waste from chemical and biological laboratories under HW49, a regulatory classification code that typically includes toxic substances, chemical reagents, and contaminated containers. Pathological waste, including animal tissues and carcasses, fell under HW01. In practice, however, public sources indicate that some labs and researchers categorized animal remains as HW49, suggesting the line between the two categories was not always kept clear. According to Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention documents, Yunfeng was one of only three firms in Hubei Province licensed to handle HW49 waste materials.

One of the laboratories contracting with Yunfeng for disposal of its HW49 waste was the now-famous Wuhan Institute of Virology. The two parties had signed a one-year contract in June 2018.

Specialized firefighters battled the blaze for over eight hours. An additional fire broke out the next morning, requiring another special unit and a massive ten tons of water. The city’s Emergency Management Bureau recorded no casualties. What was destroyed in those fires, however, was not just a couple warehouses. It was one of the key structural supports of Wuhan’s biowaste disposal network.

Nine days later, a second incident. The second of the three licensed HW49 handlers in the province was Hubei Tianyin Environmental Protection, located in Jiangling County, 140 miles from Wuhan. Reports at the time said that a chemical reaction in stored laboratory waste ignited an afternoon fire, which was extinguished within four hours with no reported injuries. That facility, too, subsequently shut down.

By late May 2019, the entirety of Wuhan’s biological research network — from the municipal CDC to the Institute of Virology on the city’s outskirts — had been reduced to a single licensed third-party disposal option for HW49 hazardous waste: a small, remote firm 190 miles away named Hubei Zhongyou Youyi Environmental Protection.

Meanwhile, at the Wuhan CDC itself, a separate and longer-standing failure had been quietly compounding. Since 1994, hazardous waste designated HW49 had been accumulating in its storage. By mid-2019, the stockpile had reached almost two metric tons. Chinese law prohibits the storage of hazardous waste for more than a year after it is created. The Wuhan CDC had disregarded that requirement for twenty-five years.

Now, in June 2019, just a few months before a planned relocation of the Wuhan CDC to a grand new facility, the agency acknowledged the waste situation in a procurement notice, describing the accumulated materials as presenting “hidden safety concerns.”

With the Yunfeng and Tianyin sites no longer operational, Zhongyou, by default, received the disposal contract in late July. Perhaps as early as August, its workers and vehicles were transporting the accumulated waste across Hubei province.

These structural failures did not exist in isolation. They reflected broader patterns within Wuhan’s research culture.

Tian Junhua, a field researcher at the same Wuhan CDC, became something of a public symbol of that culture. He was initially known as an intrepid hero in China’s quest to identify novel pathogens through field research, and the safety risks associated with his work received little scrutiny at the time.

In December 2019, as later reported by the Washington Post, Chinese state media released a video of him collecting bats in caves while wearing thin gloves and a surgical mask — protective measures grossly inadequate by international biosafety standards. The samples he collected were presumably returned for analysis to the Wuhan CDC, which was not licensed or equipped to handle unknown viruses of this sort. Residual material from these kinds of analyses could have ultimately joined the institution’s long-neglected stockpile.

The pattern was consistent: institutional ambition advancing ahead of the infrastructure and protocols required to sustain it safely.

Taken together, these simultaneous failures would have required improvisation from Wuhan’s research institutions, such as working with new and unfamiliar channels, relying on contractors operating beyond their usual capacity, and potentially bypassing established protocols. If that improvisation occurred without a corresponding reduction in research activity, the period represented an expanded window of risk in which the margin for error or mishap was thinner than usual.

By autumn 2019, the visible disruptions had subsided. In October, Wuhan hosted the Military World Games, featuring over 9,000 athletes from over 100 countries, seemingly without incident.

The Wuhan CDC storeroom had been substantially cleared and the center was ready for its move to its new facility close to Huanan Market. That move was carried out in early December, in a surprisingly low-profile manner with little more than a subtle change of address on its website. The Institute of Virology had, somehow, also adapted its operations following the loss of its primary disposal contractor.

The crises of the preceding months receded from view, unexamined and largely unrecorded in any official account as the world was about to be hit by the most significant pandemic in a century.

When pneumonia cases of unknown etiology appeared in December 2019, international attention converged rapidly on Wuhan. Investigators prioritized genomic sequencing, transmission mapping, and epidemiological tracing. In that process, the anomalies of the preceding months went unexamined — from the fires of May, the cascading failures of the province’s hazardous waste disposal network, to the Wuhan CDC’s formal acknowledgment of twenty-five years of regulatory non-compliance. These were not secret. But they were never incorporated into the broader investigative picture.

The world’s best opportunity to examine these problems up close came in early 2021, when the World Health Organization dispatched an international team to conduct fieldwork in Wuhan. Over 28 days in January and February, ten global experts drawn from countries as diverse as Denmark, Japan, and Sudan joined 17 Chinese experts and 7 WHO staff in exploring some of Wuhan’s key facilities. Among their stops was the Wuhan CDC, which they visited on February 1.

In its report, the team noted the institution’s move in December 2019 and even acknowledged that “such moves can be disruptive for the operations of any laboratory.” Yet in what amounted to a tacit admission that its homework was incomplete, the team concluded that the Wuhan CDC “reported no disruptions or incidents caused by the move.” While perhaps technically accurate, the institution’s publicly acknowledged violation of hazardous waste storage laws — a failure spanning a quarter century — is conspicuous for its absence from the report, and appears to have been entirely unknown to those who composed it. The WHO’s own Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, seemed to sense the report’s limitations: upon its release, he told the press that “further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions.” That follow-up never came.

Seven years on, the significance of these events is not primarily about attribution or blame. It is about systemic fragility. Wuhan in 2019 was home to some of the world’s most consequential virology research. It was not home to the institutional transparency, regulatory enforcement, and infrastructure redundancy that research of that nature demands.

In a system with adequate oversight, the fires of May 2019 would have generated formal inquiry. What was destroyed? What operations were disrupted? What remediation was required? Similarly, the Wuhan CDC’s decades-long failure to properly dispose of its laboratory waste, perhaps produced in part by scientists openly flouting safety requirements in their field research, should have led to an assessment of the obvious risks. Why were protocols not being followed? What changes needed to be implemented? In Wuhan, no such inquiries occurred, or, if they did, no record of them has been made available.

It is worth noting that the seven years since the outbreak have brought genuine progress within China. Regulatory oversight has been strengthened, environmental compliance has received sustained state attention, and safety standards across the research sector have been meaningfully elevated, changes driven in no small part by the lessons of the pandemic itself.

What the last seven years have not brought, however, is a full record of the available evidence. Whatever the origins of Covid-19, whether market spillover, laboratory incident, or some pathway not yet fully understood, the obligation to produce the fullest record possible remains. This includes pursuing difficult questions raised by the compounding problems that Wuhan’s laboratory system faced in 2019, months before the official outbreak. The complete story has yet to be told.