After the full text of the cables were released, it proved they'd been heavily (and misleadingly) edited. IT Wire attributed that to political actors trying to create a specific story line.

https://www.itwire.com/health/us-leaked-parts-of-cables-to-p...

The article you're citing is misleadingly edited and contains only a single claimed quote from the cables, which is actually two separate sentence fragments that are many paragraphs separated from each other, strung together to look as if they composed a single sentence. Also, one of the sentence fragments is in fact a misquote, edited to make it appear that it's talking about a shortage of technicians, when in fact the sentence it's taken from was talking about a shortage in viruses: the cables do talk about a shortage of both, but the technician shortage isn't presented in a positive light.

Other than that one edited, incorrect quote, its only citations are tweets.

The cables are both less immediately damning than the original leaked quotes, and considerably more damning than the article you're linking to claims. Here's a direct excerpt from the cables, downloaded from https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-depart... FWIW I'm only citing the last sections of the cables here, which talk about the technician shortages and impact on coronavirus research (the virus shortages are mentioned earlier).

<Blank> noted that the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory. University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB), which has one of several well-established BSL-4 labs in the United States (supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID of NIH)), has scientific collaborations with WIV, which may help alleviate this talent gap over time. Reportedly, researchers from GTMB are helping train technicians who work in the WIV BSL-4 lab. Despite this, <blank> they would welcome more help from the U.S. and international organizations as they establish "gold standard" operating procedures and training courses for the first time in China. As China is building more BSL-4 labs, including one in Harbin Veterinary Research Institute subordinated to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) for veterinary use <blank> the training for technicians and investigators working on dangerous pathogens will certainly be in demand.

6. (SBU) The ability of WIV scientists to undertake productive research despite limitations on the use of the new BSL-4 facility is demonstrated by a recent publication on the origin of SARS. Over a five-year study, <blank> (and their research team) widely sampled bats in Yunan province with funding support from NIAID/NIH, USAID, and several Chinese funding agencies. The study results were published in PLoS Pathogens online on Nov. 30, 2017 (1), and it demonstrated that a SARS-like coronavirus isolated from horseshoe bats in a single cave contain all the building blocks of the pandemic SARS-coronavirus genome that caused the human outbreak. These results strongly suggest that the highly pathogenic SARS-coronavirus originated in this bat population. Most importantly, researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like disease. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention. <blank> WIV scientists are allowed to study the SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats while they are precluded from studying human-disease causing SARS coronavirus in their new BSL-4 lab until permission for such work is granted by the NHFCP.

I hadn't actually read the cables until just now, and to be honest they're a bit scarier than I had assumed. Notably, the scientists weren't studying the already-discovered, human SARS, but they were studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats (where both original SARS and COVID-19 are believed to come from) and their interactions with ACE2, which is the receptor that both original SARS targeted and COVID-19 targets. Now, one might argue: anyone studying SARS would at some point study ACE2, since that's the receptor SARS targeted! And if you weren't allowed to study SARS, you might study coronaviruses you isolated from bats and try to get them to target ACE2, since bats are probably where SARS came from. But... Oof, that the city where the outbreak started had China's first BSL-4 lab ever, and it was studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats targeting ACE2, and they continued to study SARS-like coronaviruses since 2018 because they weren't allowed to use real SARS due to lack of technicians and investigators able to safely operate a high containment lab? That's... at least a little bit of a scary coincidence.

I think zoonotic origin is still also a fairly plausible and likely scenario, but I'm more suspicious of the lab than I was before. At the very least, studying SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from bats, made to target ACE2, seems to be a complete failure from the perspective of "emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention," which the cables note as the reason the lab exists. A SARS-like coronavirus from bats targeting ACE2 emerged literally under their noses, and they didn't predict or prevent it! Best case this is a pretty bad failure of the purpose of the lab.

Edit (although I've also edited somewhat before this): I just re-read the article after reading the cables, because something about the "sampled bats in Yunan" from the cables tickled my brain. In the article, they mention that "Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper saying that the novel coronavirus was 96 percent identical to a bat virus, RaTG13, found in Yunnan province in southern China."

That line gets tossed out like a throwaway; like it just so happened to be that WIV had taken a sample from Yunan. But it didn't just so happen to be from Yunan: all of the coronaviruses WIV used in their five-year study on making novel SARS-like coronaviruses from bats target ACE2 receptors were from bats in Yunan. And the closest living relative to COVID-19, a novel SARS-like coronavirus targeting the ACE2 receptor, is also from a bat from Yunan? That's... one hell of a coincidence.

I mean, yes, of course we'd only be able to match against samples we actually have collected. But... WIV has samples from other places too, they just didn't use them in their experiments making bat coronaviruses target ACE2; the article mentions they had also collected samples from Orlando and NYC as well, for example. So it's not entirely selection bias.

We'll probably never really know if it was a lab escape or random mutation in the wild, but that's super spooky.

To dive deeper down the rabbit hole, I read WIV's 2017 paper on their coronavirus research that the cables reference. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... TL;DR they constructed chimeras from multiple versions of bat coronaviruses to create different variations in the "receptor binding domain," specifically the genes encoding the spike protein and ORF8a. They also analyze ORF8b and ORF3b sequences, specifically noting versions of ORF3b they've studied can "antagonize interferon function" (interferons boost immune system response) and discussing their own previous studies on ORF3b. The aim of the chimeras is to create a virus targeting the human ACE2 receptor like SARS-CoV did. They succeed — noting that some of their variants "have a stronger effect than SARS-CoV" — and also note "It is very interesting to investigate in further studies whether [one wild virus variant's] ORF3b and other versions of truncated ORF3b such as [their chimeric virus variants] also show [interferon] antagonism profiles."

Reading a paper from NIH on COVID-19 sequencing — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7180649/ — guess what gets implicated?

"The SARS-CoV-2 genome was reported to possess 14 ORFs encoding 27 proteins ... When researchers compare the SARS-CoV-2 with the SARS-CoV at the amino acid level, they found the SARS-CoV-2 was quite similar to the SARS-CoV, but there were some notable differences in the 8a, 8b, and 3b protein. [Emphasis mine.]"

I don't know a lot about this subject. But as a layperson, it seems a little suspicious that WIV was making SARS-like coronaviruses in Wuhan, where the outbreak started, from bat viruses collected from Yunan, where the closest living relative of COVID-19 is from, and experimenting specifically with the proteins that are the most-novel in COVID-19 as compared to SARS?