The mysteries about the origins of COVID remain unanswered

In their first report, a team of international scientists gathered from the World Health Organization to advise on the origins of the coronavirus he said Thursday that the bats were likely carrying an ancestor coronavirus that may have spread to a mammal sold in a wildlife market.

But the team said they were needed more Chinese data to study how the virus spread to people, including the possibility that a laboratory loss will play a role.

The team, appointed by the WHO in October as the organization sought to restore its approach to studying the origins of the pandemic, said Chinese scientists shared information with them, including from unpublished studies, on two occasions.

But the gaps in Chinese relations made it difficult to determine when and where he was born the outbreak, according to the report.

Independent experts said it is unclear how the team, made up of scientists from the United States, China and two dozen other countries, can help WHO break down political barriers in China that they have. stalled lThe publication of most of the information that would localize the appearance of the virus within the borders of the country.

“The lack of political cooperation China continues to stifle any significant progress, ”said Lawrence Gostin, who directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

He said the report offered a roadmap for investigate future pandemics in less reserved countries.

WHO has asked the group for advice not only to study the origins of the coronavirus, but also to examine the emergence of future pathogens.

The team, known as the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of New Pathogens, does not have the authority to conduct research in China or elsewhere.

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical manager for COVID-19, said the report was “just the beginning of their work”.

The group should have indicated greater openness to a laboratory leak than a previous team sent by the WHO to China in early 2021.

The team’s previous joint report with China stated that a laboratory leak, although possible, was “extremely unlikely“.

WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesuscalled that assessment premature.

The latest report stated that no new data indicated a laboratory leak.

But the group’s leaders said they want to evaluate any evidence that will emerge in the future.

“We have not received any reports that really indicate that there is a laboratory leak that we believe is strong to follow,” said Marietjie Venter, team president and professor of medical virology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Efforts to investigate a laboratory leak have met with resistance from members of the China, Russia and Brazil, which did not see the need for such investigations, according to the report.

The report mentioned a number of studies on the potential role of animals in the coronavirus outbreak that had been published since the WHO team’s early work.

For example, an investigation into a live animal market in Wuhan, China indicated this Various species known to be susceptible to the coronavirus were present in the fall of 2019.

Once people linked to that market started getting sick, police closed and disinfected the facility, making it difficult for scientists to identify potential intermediate animal hosts for the virus.

The latest report said it was focusing on published and peer-reviewed studies, although it recognized a number of unpublished studies published online as “preprints.”

Among them were two articles published this year, in which a team of scientists claimed that the pandemic arose when a bat infected a wild animal, such as a raccoon dog, which was then sold at the wholesale market in. seafood of Huanan in Wuhan. .

Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist who helped conduct those studies, said yes bad lucky that the WHO team did not look closely at the unpublished research.

“I think if you read our preprints and understand the evidence,” he said, “there is actually very strong evidence that the pandemic originated through the wildlife in the Huanan market.”

Worobey and other researchers said a vital opportunity was missed in January 2020 to focus coronavirus research on the wildlife farms that supply markets like Huanan.

Instead, millions of animals were reported to have been euthanized.

Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, praised the latest report for pointing out the lack of published results from the China origin studies.

But he said his proposals for future studies on the origin of the pandemic do not adequately take into account investigations into “accidental or deliberate events,” which he believes would require expertise outside of public health.

Jesse Bloom, a virus expert at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said the report makes it clear that mitigating future pandemics
it will require consideration of both animal and laboratory origin.

“Both of these are pretty serious possibilities to think about together,” he said.

The report recommended studies of blood samples from workers in wild animal farms and live animal markets and genomic data from the first viral samples.

But the previous WHO team had proposed some similar but unsuccessful studies.

The latest report says Tedros wrote twice to Chinese officials in February asking about the status of those studies, as well as information about a possible laboratory leak.

But there was no indication that the WHO could persuade China to share the results of such work.

However, despite the difficulties, filtered some information from China.

Last week, Chinese researchers published a small study on raccoon dogs and bats collected in the Wuhan region in January 2020.

In 15 raccoon dogs, researchers found a new coronavirus species related to the one that infects dogs.

In 334 bats, researchers found coronaviruses that appear to be a mix of viruses, some linked to the one that caused COVID and others to the one that caused SARS in 2003.

“These sample sizes aren’t big enough,” said Maciej Boni, a virus expert at Pennsylvania State University.

“We need sampling on a scale of tens of thousands of bats to get the full picture.”

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