Reality is that indeed the wuhan lab was a joint french-chinese collaborative project:
>Mr Bannon even suggested that the French government, which helped to build the institute, had left behind monitoring systems after Beijing shut them out of the project before it opened in 2017. -
with the underlying idea on french side being -"if we don't go for it with them, not only we'll get zero say/oversight, and they aren't going to take a "no" for answer kindly, but somebody else will go for it anyway"-
If memory serves it wasn't designed to be a BSL4, but a BSL3, which in practice turned out to be a BSL3++... As in we're a tad cheating with the specs here, which is implicitly corroborated by banon in the article:
>these guys were doing experiments which they weren’t fully authorized [for] or knew what they were doing and that somehow, either through an inadvertent mistake, or on a lab technician, one of these things got out,"
Another little known aspect of that story, is that not only the lab never received the adequate budgets due to switching administrations (I believe the project was started under chirac's presidency (1995–2007))... But also that the PLA was "surprisingly" not totally on board with the project, because they weren't given 100% control and oversight over it
...
So there's that perspective, which isn't featured in the article above
Source: my readings IRL
Reality is that indeed the wuhan lab was a joint french-chinese collaborative project:
>>Mr Bannon even suggested that the French government, which helped to build the institute, had left behind monitoring systems after Beijing shut them out of the project before it opened in 2017. -[**Daily Mail**](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8513631/Scientists-Wuhan-virus-lab-defected-West-reveals-Steve-Bannon.html)
with the underlying idea on french side being -"if we don't go for it with them, not only we'll get zero say/oversight, and they aren't going to take a "no" for answer kindly, but somebody else will go for it anyway"-
If memory serves it wasn't designed to be a BSL4, but a BSL3, which in practice turned out to be a BSL3++... As in we're a tad cheating with the specs here, which is implicitly corroborated by banon in the article:
>>these guys were doing experiments which they weren’t fully authorized [for] or knew what they were doing and that somehow, either through an inadvertent mistake, or on a lab technician, one of these things got out,"
Another little known aspect of that story, is that not only the lab never received the adequate budgets due to switching administrations (I believe the project was started under chirac's presidency (1995–2007))... But also that the PLA was "surprisingly" not totally on board with the project, because they weren't given 100% control and oversight over it
...
So there's that perspective, which isn't featured in the article above
Source: my readings IRL
(post is archived)