WHO: Origin of coronavirus must come back into focus

(CN) — Scientists and the World Health Organization on Wednesday said studies into the origins of the deadly coronavirus pandemic must pick up steam to resolve a mystery that has become poisoned by political rivalry between the United States and China.

The question of how the virus began infecting humans is taking center stage again after U.S. media reported that American intelligence agencies on Tuesday delivered an inconclusive classified report to President Joe Biden on the possibility that the virus escaped from a coronavirus laboratory in Wuhan, China.

On Wednesday, an international team of top scientists who led a WHO-commissioned study into the origins of the coronavirus wrote in Nature magazine that time is running out on finding the origins of the virus, scientifically classified as SARS-CoV-2.

“The search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is at a critical juncture,” the scientists wrote in Nature. They warned that it will become harder to figure out which animals and humans were potentially infected first as time goes by.

“Crucially, the window is rapidly closing on the biological feasibility of conducting the critical trace-back of people and animals inside and outside China,” they said.

They wrote that it will become harder to discover people working in China on wildlife farms who might have been infected first as antibodies against the virus wane. They added that many potential animals carrying the virus were culled after people starting falling sick in Wuhan, “making any evidence of early coronavirus spillover increasingly difficult to find.”

After a visit to Wuhan in February, the team of international scientists issued a report in March on the likely origins of the virus in conjunction with Chinese scientists.

But the report became controversial after it said it was extremely unlikely that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab. Instead, the report said the virus most likely spilled over from animals into humans. Under pressure from the U.S., the WHO subsequently said the lab leak theory would not be excluded from further study, a move that angered China.

At a news briefing on Wednesday, WHO experts said they too are concerned about the pace of new studies into the origins of the virus.

“We are in agreement about the urgency to continue those studies,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on the pandemic. “From our point of view, it's time to move on, get on with this.”

Van Kerkhove said progress has been made in many areas and that Chinese scientists said they are poised to release new data.

“What we're hoping for is that any release of information on future studies goes from a political debate to a scientific one,” Van Kerkhove said.

In the meantime, the WHO has set up a new scientific committee to oversee new studies into the pandemic's origins and to examine how to be better prepared for future pandemics.

It remains highly unlikely that China will allow outside experts to conduct new examinations of its coronavirus labs. Indeed, China has accused the U.S. of allowing the virus to be released from a military lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and demanded a probe of U.S. labs.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the chief of emergencies at WHO, called China's assertions denying the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan while alleging it could have escaped from a U.S. lab contradictory.

“It is a contradiction if you're saying that the lab hypothesis is a nonstarter from a Chinese perspective but we now need to go and look at labs in other countries,” Ryan said. “I find that difficult to understand.”

Ryan said it is nonetheless crucial for there to be more scrutiny over research labs around the world and to “have a framework about how this work is done.”

He said the WHO was looking at the possibility of sending smaller teams of scientists to China to collect new data.

The focus on how the virus emerged is likely to gain new momentum this week if the Biden administration declassifies portions of the new intelligence report.

Media reports said U.S. intelligence agencies said they could not say for sure how the virus began circulating among humans due to a lack of information from China.

Since the pandemic was declared in March 2020, the U.S. has accused China of keeping secret data from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that specializes in bat coronaviruses. Scientists are divided over the possibility of a lab leak.

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

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