https://www.economist.com/international/2021/08/21/the-world-needs-a-proper-investigation-into-how-covid-19-started

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[                    ]
InternationalAug 21st 2021 edition

Origins and obfuscation
The world needs a proper investigation into how covid-19 started

China, though, is not keen

[20210821_IRD001_0]
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Aug 21st 2021

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"THE VIRUS MYSTERY", broadcast on August 12th, drew uncommonly wide
attention for a Danish television documentary. That was because it
featured Peter Ben Embarek, an expert on food security and zoonotic
diseases, casting doubt on the conclusions of a "joint study" on the
origins of the covid-19 pandemic carried out earlier this year under
the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Dr Ben Embarek
was the senior WHO figure who went to China as part of that study.

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In March the joint study reported that it was "extremely unlikely"
that the virus had been released in a laboratory accident. Dr Ben
Embarek revealed that this conclusion did not come from a balanced
assessment of all the relevant evidence but from a steadfast refusal
by the Chinese members of the joint study to support anything
stronger. Indeed they only allowed even that minimal assessment on
the condition that the report did not call for further investigation
into the question. He also pointed out that the idea that the point
of spillover was someone collecting bat samples for research purposes
belongs in the "likely" basket, along with other human interactions
with wild bats.

Problems in the joint study had long been clear. Within the WHO one
source describes it as "riddled with compromises and sloppiness".
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director-general, was uneasy
about the way it was carried out. He pushed back at the
marginalisation of the lab-leak hypothesis, particularly when the
final report was released in March. He has since called for further
investigations into it, as well as into other possibilities.

The further unravelling of the joint study matters because, more than
a year and a half after the covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, a city in
Hubei, was first recognised as the work of a new pathogen, there has
been nothing like a thorough international investigation of how that
pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, got into humans and spread round the world. The
pandemic's death toll stands at 9m-18m, according to a model which
The Economist has built on the basis of excess-mortality reports and
other indicators. The question of how it started matters both for the
relatives of the dead and for those who wish to prevent such an
outbreak happening again. China's efforts to stop the world from
answering it are both shabby and, to an extent, self-defeating. The
more the truth seems hidden, the more it seems suspicious.

Earnest calls for an international investigation into the origins of
covid-19 began in April 2020, voiced most clearly by Scott Morrison,
the prime minister of Australia. The next month the World Health
Assembly, the gathering of government representatives which serves as
the WHO's decision-making body, passed a motion calling for a study
into the origins of the pandemic. But in order to be acceptable to
China--which had reacted furiously to Mr Morrison's original
suggestion--the work was set up as a joint research project between
two teams of scientists, one Chinese, one international. And it was
to be based on "scientific and collaborative field missions", rather
than a targeted and forensic inquiry into all the relevant
circumstances.

The terms of reference, which were subsequently negotiated behind
closed doors, allowed the Chinese hosts to frame the joint study's
work in the way which best suited them. The study was set up to build
on pre-existing Chinese research, not to delve into unvetted data.
Investigating the laboratories that had been working with
coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan was not part of its terms of
reference.

After a lot of wrangling, the international team got to China in
January this year. Data about the first reported covid-19 cases,
those from December 2019, were one subject of friction with their
hosts. The Chinese had reported 174 such cases, but would not share
the underlying data on which those reports were based. Hearing that
these vital data were not being made available worried Dr Tedros
enough that he lobbied the Chinese government for access. The
authorities declined, citing concerns over citizens' privacy. It
could have been anonymised.

Elsewhere the team appears to have been knowingly misled. Take, for
example, the live-animal trade at the Huanan seafood and wildlife
market, a site associated with a number of Wuhan's earliest recorded
cases of covid-19. In its final report, the study group took at face
value claims there was no credible evidence that live mammals were
sold there in 2019. A lot of eyewitness accounts gainsay that; so
does a study published in Scientific Reports, a journal, this summer.

One report and no more

The Scientific Reports paper found that 18 species of mammal had been
for sale in Wuhan between May 2017 and November 2019; gunshot wounds
and trapping injuries suggested that almost a third of them were
taken from the wild. Although the paper was published only recently,
it was submitted to the journal in October 2020. Chinese law requires
that all covid-19 research be reviewed by the government before it is
sent to a journal. Some Chinese authorities would have known of its
contents before the team arrived.

The market is not the only way for animals and the pathogens they
carry to get into Wuhan. The horseshoe bats in which the closest wild
relatives to SARS-CoV-2 have been found do not live anywhere near the
city, but the two laboratories there that were known to have engaged
in coronavirus research received samples from bat caves around the
country. The joint-study team was not allowed to investigate the
procedures around, or documentation of, this research; when it
visited the laboratories the team was shown presentations on safety
procedures but no more.

[20210821_I]

When the researchers left Wuhan the WHO's Geneva headquarters told
them that their report needed to be laid out scientifically and could
express dissenting opinions; the international members and the
Chinese members did not have to reach a consensus. However, according
to sources within the WHO, the team felt committed to producing a
joint report with their Chinese counterparts. Dr Tedros was so
unhappy with what finally emerged from the processes that he nobbled
the report as it left the starting blocks, rejecting its contention
that the possibility of a lab leak needed no further investigation.

On May 26th President Joe Biden ordered America's intelligence
services to report on the pandemic's origins in 90 days (time will be
up on August 24th). When he and his fellow G7 leaders met in June
they joined in calling for a timely, transparent and science-based
follow-up study. On July 16th Dr Tedros laid out the next steps which
the WHO wants to see taken. They include further work on the Wuhan
animal markets, studies of early cases and audits of local
laboratories.

The Chinese government has reacted angrily to the idea of further
studies on its territory. Zeng Yixin, the vice-minister of China's
National Health Commission, said he was "shocked" by the plan to
investigate a lab leak, saying it was "impossible" to accept.
According to the Global Times, a tub-thumping tabloid run by the
Communist Party, 55 countries have sent written complaints about the
proposal for further investigations to the WHO. Dr Tedros, elected
director-general with China's support in 2017 and derided by
President Donald Trump as China's puppet, may now face a
Chinese-backed candidate when he looks for reappointment later this
year.

In the absence of any hope that China will co-operate, sources of
data beyond its control have become increasingly important. One area
of interest is genetic sequence data. Another is early cases exported
from China.

See what you did there

An online open-source-intelligence group which calls itself DRASTIC
has been scouring sequencing data to get insight into activities at
the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). When researchers publish
sequences they typically post the raw data from which those sequences
are assembled to public databases such as the sequence-read archive
at America's National Centre for Biotechnology Information.
Contamination events in the laboratory, or within sequencing machines
themselves, mean these data sometimes contain sequences not meant to
be there. In theory such evidence could reveal nefarious goings-on.

Such work, while promising, takes a lot of resources. If you have the
sort of supercomputers available to America's national labs it gets
easier. Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist who works with DRASTIC,
says he has a hunch the American intelligence community's 90-day
study is working the same angle. It is conceivable that the
intelligence services might have been able to filch raw sequence
reads directly from Chinese sequencing machines, thus picking up even
more data.

Sequencing data only offers a way forward if the virus did indeed
leak out of a lab, something which remains a possibility but which is
far from proven. The study of early cases should be useful whatever
route it took; the closer you get to understanding the when and where
of the crossing-over from animal to human, the easier it should be to
learn something of the how.

On the basis of information provided by China the joint study
concluded it was unlikely for there to have been any substantial
transmission in Wuhan before December 2019. That is unlikely to be
true. For one thing the South China Morning Post, a newspaper based
in Hong Kong, obtained government documents in 2020 which showed one
to five new cases a day in Wuhan from November 17th 2019 onwards.
Further evidence has strengthened the possibility that the virus
could have been in circulation much earlier than the official story
allows.

[20210821_I]

That circulation need not have been limited to China. There is
increasing evidence suggesting early infections elsewhere. These
cases would have been exported from China; no virologists doubt that
Hubei was where the virus got going within humans. But if circulation
in Hubei goes back further than thought and cannot be directly
assessed through studies there, the presence of cases elsewhere
offers an alternative way to get an idea of the timing. If a specific
travel link were identified, that might help identify a group in
Hubei which was infected early on.

A recent study of blood samples from 9,144 adults in 12 different
regions of France found seven which contained antibodies against 
SARS-CoV-2, all of them taken in November 2019. An Italian
lung-cancer screening trial has found samples taken in September 2019
which seem to contain anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Another antibody
study suggests the virus was circulating at a low level in northern
Italy at the same time, notably in Lombardy, a region which has close
connections to Wuhan through the garment trade, and saw Europe's
first major outbreak of covid-19 in March 2020.

Antibody tests can give false positives. In a preprint published on
August 6th by the Lancet, researchers in Lombardy reported on looking
instead for SARS-CoV-2 gene sequences. Examining 289 swabs and urine
tests taken from people who had presented with a rash as far back as
the second half of 2019, they found SARS-CoV-2 sequences in 13, the
earliest of which was taken on September 12th.

Sudhir Kumar of Temple University in Philadelphia says the Lancet
preprint is likely to inspire other investigators to go back and look
at retrospective hospital samples. That should help his own research
into the origins of the virus. A family tree Dr Kumar and his
colleagues have built from vast numbers of published SARS-CoV-2
genomes allows them to predict the sequence of the progenitor virus
from which they are all descended. This sequence differs in three
places from that found in the earliest samples taken from patients in
Wuhan, meaning there had been enough spread for a certain amount of
viral mutation to take place before December. Dr Kumar says that an
analysis of the Lombardy sequences suggests that the timeline for the
origin of the virus in China might now extend back to the late
summer.

More systematic international research into these early infections
and their circumstances is needed. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of
emerging diseases and zoonoses at the WHO, suggests it may be
possible to prioritise work in areas which saw the earliest outbreaks
in America, France, Italy and Spain. "I think the floodgates will
open one day," says Dr Kumar.

A last line of light

An early origin would fit with the timeline that lab-leak proponents
tend to favour. Early this August, the minority Republican staff on
the House foreign-affairs committee released an 84-page report
arguing this case. It makes much of a small but deadly disease
outbreak which took place at an abandoned copper mine in Yunnan in
2012. As DRASTIC showed last year, a virus studied at WIV which had
been taken from that mine is the closest known relative to SARS-CoV
-2.

The report sees importance in the removal, on September 12th 2019, of
a database containing details of sequences and samples from the WIV.
This is read as the beginning of a cover-up, and thus as the point
when the authorities first knew something had gone amiss, arguing for
a leak in late August or early September. The WIV says it was a
response to cyber-attacks.

A leak is not the only research-related possibility. The first person
infected could have been someone employed by the WIV or another lab
to collect bats and samples--the prospect to which Dr Ben Embarek
pointed in his television interview. And it is important to remember
that some other form of spillover outside the lab, either directly
from a bat or by way of some other species, may well be to blame.

China clearly does not want lab-leaks investigated; but that does not
mean it knows one happened. It is also being misleading about Huanan
market, denying access to early-case data and obfuscating in various
other non-lab-leak-specific ways. The most obvious explanation is
that it does not really want any definitive answer to the question.
An unsanitary market, a reckless bat-catcher or a hapless spelunker
would not be as bad in terms of blame as a source in a government
laboratory. But any definite answer to the origin question probably
leaves China looking bad, unless it can find a way to blame someone
else. To that end China has called for an investigation of Fort
Detrick in Maryland, historically the home of American bioweapons
research; state media regularly publish speculations about its
involvement.

The possibility of spillover from wild bats does not have to be
studied in China. Yunnan abuts onto Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, and
bats are not sticklers in matters of territory. Samples taken outside
China could provide a good idea of viral diversity the other side of
the border. A thorough evaluation of the existing farm-animal and
wildlife trade in the region would also be useful.

Yet there is an inherent risk in such work that needs to be
considered. Efforts to uncover the roots of covid-19 by seeking out a
natural reservoir of something very like SARS-CoV-2 would, by
definition, expose people to the sort of risks that can seed
pandemics. Ironically, the very possibility of a lab leak raises
questions about how most safely to pursue investigations into other
possibilities.

[20210821_I]

When he called for further inquiries in July, Dr Tedros also
announced the formation of a new permanent group of pathogen hunters,
the International Scientific Advisory Group for Origins of Novel
Pathogens (SAGO). He wants it to organise further studies of SARS-CoV
-2. But it will also need to look at more general questions for the
future--such as how to be sure that, come what may, studies of
pathogens involved in past disease outbreaks never create further
outbreaks of their own. #

Dig deeper

All our stories relating to the pandemic and the vaccines can be
found on our coronavirus hub. You can also find trackers showing the
global roll-out of vaccines, excess deaths by country and the virus's
spread across Europe and America.

This article appeared in the International section of the print
edition under the headline "Putting it all together"

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