Cryptic messages could prove Wuhan lab leak after scientists refer to ‘opening Pandora’s box’ weeks before outbreak

CRYPTIC messages hidden in official documents could prove Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan, a new report says.

An expert on language used by China’s officials believes he has found clues in phrases such as scientists talking about opening a “Pandora’s box”.

Toy Reid was part of a team of researchers who worked on a US Senate investigation into the idea that Covid leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The Chinese initially pointed to a market in the Covid epicentre as being a possible source of the pandemic, which has killed 6.5 million people across the globe.

But the presence of the lab that researched viruses such as Covid inevitably led to accusations about it being the ‘ground zero’.

The senate report concluded that Covid was “most likely the result of a research-related incident”.

Now more details have emerged about what the Senate researcher team found.

The 44-year-old Reid is a fluent Chinese speaker and former diplomat but he explained even native speakers struggle to understand the language of China’s bureaucrats.

“It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom,” he investigative website.

“When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”

He was able find a way to access messages archived on the website of the WIV and began decoding the language.

Reid began probing into the messages to he found scientists under intense pressure to produce breakthroughs.

But then he came across one message lamented a lack of “equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining” such a lab.

Then in November 2019, as the world was blissfully unaware of Covid, reports began to surface about a biosecurity breach.

One massage read “once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box” adding “these viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace”.

The message says that “every time this has happened” the lab’s Communist Party members “have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel”.

Reid said that according to his interpretation, they were concerned officials would arrive from Beijing “to scream at them” – which in fact happened next.

A high ranking official arrived claiming to have “important oral remarks and written instructions” from China’s President Xi Jinping himself as well as from Prime Minister Li Keqiang.