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In 2018, after scientist diplomats from the U.S. embassy in Beijing visited the WIV, they were so concerned by the lack of safety and management at the lab that the diplomats sent two official warnings back to the U.S. One of the official cables, obtained by The Washington Post, suggested that the lab's work on bat coronaviruses with the potential for human transmission could risk causing a new SARS-like pandemic, Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote.

"During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory," the officials said in their cable dated to Jan. 19, 2018. ...

The WIV lab, along with researchers in the U.S. and Switzerland, showed in 2015 the scary-good capability of bat coronaviruses to thrive in human cells. In that paper, which was published in 2015 in the journal Nature Medicine, they described how they had created a chimeric SARS-like virus out of the surface spike protein of a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats, called SHC014, and the backbone of a SARS virus that could be grown in mice. The idea was to look at the potential of coronaviruses circulating in bat populations to infect humans. In a lab dish, the chimeric coronavirus could infect and replicate in primary human airway cells; the virus also was able to infect lung cells in mice.

That study was met with some pushback from researchers who considered the risk of that kind of research to outweigh the benefits. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was one of those scientists. Wain-Hobson emphasized the fact that this chimeric virus "grows remarkably well" in human cells, adding that "If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory," Nature News reported.

A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome
coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory
syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species
transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we
examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-
CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat
populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2,
we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing
the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted
SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b
viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone
can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor
human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate
efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro
titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally,
in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric
virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of
available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic
modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody
and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from
infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis
of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious
full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust
viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a
potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently
circulating in bat populations.