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《世界需要对 Covid-19 的起源进行真正的调查》
——世卫组织的一个研究小组已抵达中国，但不会调查冠状病毒起源于实验室的可能性
。
《The World Needs a Real Investigation Into the Origins of Covid-19》
A team of WHO researchers has arrived in China but won’t investigate the
possibility that the coronavirus originated in a lab.
By Alina Chan and Matt Ridley
In the first week of January, scientists representing the World Health
Organization (WHO) were due to arrive in China to trace the origins of Covid
-19. The team membership and terms of reference were preapproved by the
Chinese government, yet at the last minute Beijing denied entry to the
investigators. This prompted WHO to take the rare step of criticizing China,
which relented and allowed the group to enter the country this week.
The brief standoff highlights a more serious problem: the inadequacy of WHO
’s current investigative framework for exploring all plausible origins of
Covid-19. The world needs an inquiry that considers not just natural origins
but the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19,
escaped from a laboratory. The WHO team, however, plans to build on reports
by Chinese scientists rather than mount an independent investigation. Given
that Chinese authorities have been slow to release information, penalized
scientists and doctors who shared clinical and genomic details of the novel
coronavirus, and have since demonstrated a keen interest in controlling the
narrative of how the virus emerged, this is not a promising foundation for
WHO’s investigation.
Critics are concerned that the WHO team doesn’t have the expertise for an
investigation that would examine possible lab origins of the coronavirus.
The WHO team includes experts who traced the origins of Ebola and MERS
outbreaks, but critics are concerned that it doesn’t have the expertise for
an investigation that would examine possible lab origins. Dr. David Relman
of Stanford University, who raised the possibility early on that the virus
might have leaked from a lab, told us: “Based on the scant information that
has been shared publicly about the WHO investigation, it doesn’t appear
that WHO has adequately represented the range of views and perspectives of
key stakeholders or incorporated all needed forms of expertise.” Responding
to whether the WHO team will investigate lab origins, Dr. Peter Ben Embarek
, the leader of the team, told us, “If our studies point to a possible lab
accident, then other international mechanisms would be involved to document
such an event. It would take time and additional types of expertise.”
Could the virus have escaped from a laboratory? Then-deputy U.S. national
security adviser Matthew Pottinger told international leaders late last year
that the latest intelligence points to SARS-CoV-2 having originated from
the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This intelligence has not been made
public, and China has denied that the virus came from a lab. Dr. Shi Zhengli
, whose lab at WIV has been a suspected source of the virus, told Scientific
American last March that “none of the [early SARS-CoV-2] sequences matched
those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.”
The hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab remains controversial.
Last March, in the journal Nature Medicine, Dr. Kristian Andersen of the
Scripps Research Institute and colleagues asserted that “SARS-CoV-2 is not
a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” They said
there was no evidence to support lab-based origins and that the available
data was consistent with natural evolution. Dr. David Robertson of the
University of Glasgow told us that “SARS-CoV-2 is just too different to the
[viruses] we were aware of prior to its emergence.”
The ability to build coronavirus genomes without leaving traces of
manipulation has existed for years.
In November, however, in the journal PNAS, Dr. Relman wrote that Dr.
Andersen’s argument didn’t acknowledge that unpublished viruses closely
related to SARS-CoV-2 could have been studied in a laboratory. For more than
a decade, Dr. Shi has been publishing experiments on “chimera”
coronaviruses, built by inserting parts of newly found viruses into better
known viruses to understand how novel viruses could infect human cells.
These were used to assess the risk that such viruses could spill over into
humans.
The ability to build coronavirus genomes without leaving traces of
manipulation has existed for years. Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a world-leading coronavirus expert and
collaborator of Dr. Shi, told an Italian television documentary last June,
“In sequence databases there were sequences for a large number of bat
coronaviruses that were SARS-like, reported out of China.” He added that “
whether the virus existed beforehand, it would only be within the records of
the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.”
For some scientists, the location of the first detected outbreak is enough
to raise suspicions. In the words of Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers
University, “the outbreak occurred on the doorstep of laboratories that
conduct the world’s largest research project on horseshoe-bat viruses, that
have the world’s largest collection of horseshoe-bat viruses, and that
possessed and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the
outbreak virus. The laboratories actively searched for new horseshoe-bat
viruses in horseshoe-bat colonies in caves in remote rural areas in Yunnan
province, brought those new horseshoe-bat viruses to Wuhan, and then mass-
produced and studied those new horseshoe-bat viruses, year-round, inside
Wuhan.”
Such concerns have gained prominence over the past year and were recently
explored in a much-discussed article in New York magazine, “The Lab-Leak
Hypothesis” by Nicholson Baker.
SARS viruses are known to have escaped previously from laboratories in
Singapore, Taiwan and twice in Beijing. Dr. Maciej Boni of Pennsylvania
State University told us that if the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab (
though he thinks this is unlikely), he would expect that “some of the early
December cases should be traceable to WIV employees, family members of WIV
employees or frequent social contacts of WIV employees. If this evidence is
presented, it will be the first ‘positive evidence’ that SARS-CoV-2 may
have a lab origin.”
What would it take to properly investigate possible lab origins? Dr. Relman
said that “it will be critical to obtain independently verified, time-
stamped records of sample inventories, data, lab notebooks and records,
internal and external communications, personnel health records and serum
samples, and access to personnel so that they can be interviewed in private
without fear of repercussions.” Yet the path to such a credible
investigation seems nearly impossible in the current geopolitical climate.
Several scientists also told us they were troubled by the presence on the
WHO team of Dr. Peter Daszak of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance. Dr.
Daszak has been a longtime collaborator of Dr. Shi since they worked
together to trace SARS viruses to bats after the 2003 epidemic. His
organization has administered more than $100 million in U.S. federal grants
to fund overseas fieldwork and laboratory experiments, including those
performed by WIV, to find and characterize new viruses in order to predict
the next pandemic, according to the EcoHealth Alliance.
Last February, Dr. Peter Daszak organized a statement in The Lancet, a
prominent medical journal, to ‘condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that
Covid-19 doesn’t have a natural origin.’
Last February, Dr. Daszak organized a statement in The Lancet, a prominent
medical journal, to “condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19
doesn’t have a natural origin.” The statement was drafted when little was
yet known about the virus. Dr. Daszak declined to comment for this piece,
but a spokesman for Dr. Daszak told us: “The Lancet letter was written
during a time in which Chinese scientists were receiving death threats and
the letter was intended as a showing of support for them as they were caught
between important work trying to stop an outbreak and the crush of online
harassment.” Yet, in June, Dr. Daszak wrote an opinion piece for the
Guardian headlined, “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-
19 wasn’t created in a lab.”
The spokesman for Dr. Daszak told us that any questions about his potential
conflict of interest should be referred to WHO. Dr. Ben Embarek said that he
sees no problem in having Dr. Daszak on his investigative team: “Of course
the WHO team will have discussion with the scientists and researchers in
Wuhan. And therefore it is good to have on the team someone who knows the
area well.”
Miles Pomper, a co-author of an expert guide to investigating outbreak
origins published in October by the Middlebury Institute of International
Studies at Monterey, said that “The independence of the WHO investigation
may be seriously compromised by the process used to choose investigators….
In particular, the choice of Dr. Daszak, who has a personal stake in
ensuring current Chinese practices continue and who is a longtime
collaborator of a scientist at the center of the investigation, is likely to
taint its results.”
Another co-author of the guide, Dr. Filippa Lentzos, said, “We also need to
take a hard look in the mirror. It is our own virologists, funders and
publishers who are driving and endorsing the practice of actively hunting
for viruses and the high-risk research of deliberately making viruses more
dangerous to humans. We need to be more open about the heavily vested
interests of some of the scientists given prominent platforms to make claims
about the pandemic’s origins.”
As a scientist and a science writer, we believe that both natural and lab-
based scenarios of Covid-19’s origins must be rigorously investigated, not
only to avert future pandemics but for the sake of science’s reputation.
The formal investigation launched by WHO is only taking steps to look into
natural origins. That needs to change.
—Dr. Chan is a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Mr.
Ridley is a member of the House of Lords and the author, most recently, of
“How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom.”
Appeared in the January 16, 2021, print edition. |
