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inside that first reportAn international team of scientists brought together by the World Health Organization to advise on the origins of the coronavirus said on Thursday that bats most likely carried an ancestor of the coronavirus, which may have spread to a mammal that was later sold at a wildlife market. But the team said more Chinese data are needed to study how the virus spreads to humans, including the possibility that lab leaks may play a role.
The team appointed by WHO in October, the organization sought to reset its approach to examining the origins of the pandemicHe said Chinese scientists shared information with them twice, including from unpublished research. However, the report noted that gaps in Chinese reports made it difficult to determine when and where the outbreak occurred.
Independent experts said it was unclear how the team worked. Consisting of scientists from the United States, China, and two dozen other countriesIt could help WHO overcome the political barriers in China that have stopped the publication of most information that would locate the outbreak of the virus within the country’s borders.
“The lack of political cooperation from China continues to stifle meaningful progress,” said Lawrence Gostin, who directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. He said the report offers a roadmap for investigating future outbreaks in less secret countries.
WHO has asked the group for advice not only to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, but also to study the emergence of future pathogens. The team, known as the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of New Pathogens, is not mandated to conduct research in China or elsewhere.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, said the report was “just the beginning of their work”.
The group was expected to show that it was more prone to a lab leak than a previous team WHO sent to China in early 2021. The team’s previous joint report with China said that while a lab leak is possible, it is “extremely unlikely.” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, described this assessment as premature.
The latest report said no new data points to the lab leak. But the group’s leaders said they’d like to consider any future evidence.
“We haven’t had any reports that really show that there was a lab leak that we thought we needed to follow up,” said Marietjie Venter, head of the team and professor of medical virology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Efforts to investigate a lab leak have met resistance from team members from China, Russia and Brazil, who do not need such investigations, the report said.
The report cited a number of studies on the potential role of animals in the emergence of the coronavirus that have been published since the previous WHO team’s work. For example, a questionnaire An official of a livestock market in Wuhan, China, stated that there were several species known to be susceptible to coronavirus in the fall of 2019.
When people associated with that market started getting sick, police closed and disinfected the facility. makes it harder for scientists to identify potential intermediate animal hosts for the virus.
The most recent report said it focuses on published, peer-reviewed studies, but considers a number of unpublished studies published online to be “preprints.” Between them two articles published this yearA group of scientists argued that the pandemic originated when a bat infected a wild animal such as a raccoon dog and was later sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale. market in Wuhan.
Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who helped carry out these studies, said it was unfortunate 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’s actually very strong evidence that the pandemic originated through wildlife in the Huanan market.”
Dr. Worobey and other researchers said in January 2020 a vital opportunity was lost to focus the search for coronavirus at wildlife farms supplying markets like Huanan. Instead, millions of animals were reportedly culled.
Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, praised the latest report for noting that findings from China’s own origination studies have not been published. But her recommendations for future pandemic-driven studies do not sufficiently account for investigations into “accidental or deliberate events,” which she says will require expertise outside of public health, she said.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said the report makes it clear that reducing future pandemic threats is necessary given both animal and laboratory origins.
“Both of these are serious enough possibilities to be considered together,” he said.
The report recommended investigating blood samples from workers at wildlife farms and livestock markets, and genomic data from early viral samples. But the previous WHO team had suggested some similar studies to no avail.
The latest report, Dr. He said Tedros had written to Chinese officials twice in February to request information about the status of these studies and a possible lab leak. But there was no indication that WHO could persuade China to share the results of such a study.
But despite the difficulties, some information from China leaked.
Chinese researchers last week published A small study of raccoon dogs and bats collected in the Wuhan area in January 2020. Researchers found a new type of coronavirus associated with a coronavirus that infects dogs in 15 raccoon dogs. Researchers found coronaviruses in 334 bats, some of which appeared to be a mix of viruses related to the one that caused Covid, others to the one that caused SARS in 2003.
“These sample sizes aren’t big enough,” said Maciej Boni, a virologist at Penn State University. “We need tens of thousands of bat-scale samples to get a full picture.”
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