Wuhan in early shopping spree for Covid-19 test kits

There was a buy-up of coronavirus testing equipment in Wuhan in 2019, with purchasing contracts increasing by more than 50 per cent in a year.

A security guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in February. Picture: AFP

There was a buy-up of coronavirus testing equipment in Wuhan in 2019, with purchasing contracts increasing by more than 50 per cent from the year before.

Official Chinese government procurement data shows the buy-up of PCR equipment began in July 2019. The data has been handed to intelligence officials investigating the origins of Covid-19.

Cyber security analysts say it could point to Chinese authorities becoming aware of an outbreak of coronavirus earlier than their ­December 2019 admission to the World Health Organisation.

But the data could also indicate an increasing focus on virological research in Wuhan laboratories, including as part of the Global ­Virome Project, which had a goal of developing a database of pathogens with pandemic potential.

There were 135 contracts containing PCR equipment issued by Wuhan laboratories in 2019, up from 89 in 2018, 72 in 2017 and 53 in 2016. The spending on PCR equipment increased about 600 per cent from 2015 to 2019 in Wuhan. The amount of money spent buying PCR equipment increased from 10.1 million yuan ($2.2m) in 2015 to 19.1 million yuan in 2016, 29 million in 2017, 36 million in 2018 and 67 million in 2019.

Cyber security analysts Robert Potter and David Robinson at ­Internet 2.0 recovered the data, with their report finding an “elevated purchasing rend by the CDC, Animal Testing Bureaus and PLA”.

Mr Potter said his team spent about six months trying to reconstruct and restore the data that had been removed from the internet.

“You can see across the trend that, starting in May and all the way through to December, you see a massive increase in PCR procurement data. Some of this may be benign but taken together it gives us a trend that comprehensively challenges the official narrative that the pandemic started in December,” he said.

“It also shows there’s a significant amount of procurement from the government level, the PLA and the Centre for Disease Control, as well as sensitive laboratories that are in the Hubei province.”

The Wuhan Hongshan District Centre made two purchases of pathogen detection equipment for military games at 1.8 million Yuan, announcing it on September 2019. The games took place in Wuhan in October and some US government analysts suspect this may have been the first superspreader event of the pandemic.

“The contract specifically noted that they were for the military games. The entire title of the contract was directly on the reason for that purchase,” said Mr Robinson, a former Australian Army intelligence officer. “We know that that contract is abnormal, significant and out of trend.”

Mr Robinson said the increase in PCR procurement data occurred between July and October 2019. The increase in PCR equipment could also reflect the revolutionary period of growth in gene sequencing at biological research institutions globally.

A US government source said the data “raises a lot of questions” and said the surge “also correlates with the 2017 start of China’s ­Global Virome Project”.

“The increase in orders correlates with the time period in which the US CDC and NIH were helping China expand its infectious disease/influenza surveillance ­capacity,” the source said. “The increase in orders also occurs during the time when EcoHealth Alliance and PREDICT was increasing China’s laboratory capacity.

“China launched a couple of new initiatives to expand their infectious disease surveillance during this time period.”

Former director of US National ­Intelligence John Ratcliffe said the buy-up of PCR equipment in Wuhan in 2019 was significant. “I think there’s more than just smoke here, I think there’s fire from a whole bunch of different sources,” he said. “I think that would be ­another compelling piece of evidence, if you need more. I don’t need more.”

PCR – Polymerase Chain Reaction – equipment is used to ­research DNA and genes in laboratories. It has also been used to test for coronaviruses.

The data shows the significant increase in PCR purchasing starts in July 2019.

Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said the outbreak of Covid-19 may have started as early as that month.

“I’ve seen datapoints that place it in the summertime of 2019, late summer, July, August of 2019,” he said in an interview for Sky News documentary What Really Happened in Wuhan.