Just six weeks after declaring a global health emergency, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the spread of the new coronavirus pandemic on March 11, 2020. But while the coronavirus hosts that caused the SARS and MERS outbreaks in 2003-2004 were identified within a few months, the origin of the current SARS-CoV-2 virus – along with its myriad mutations and variants – has proved more elusive. . Last September, a working group set up by the Lancet COVID-19 Commission to find the final source of the pandemic disbanded after 14 months amid resentment, accusations and conflicts of interest. And the investigation by the WHO, a public health service without investigative powers, has been largely halted after a tightly controlled exploratory trip to China in January 2021. China has not yet provided data to the WHO to support Beijing’s claim that the coronavirus spread had a natural zoonotic route – movement from bats to a human host – and the Huanan seafood market where the first cases of rapid disinfection were identified. . The struggle to find the source helped to give more credibility to the possibility that the virus came from elsewhere, including leaks into the laboratory. Whatever the case, the evidence remains within China. “I am convinced that China is not transparent. “They avoid a lot of things,” said Colin Butler, an honorary professor at the National Center for Epidemiology and Population Health at the National University of Australia in Canberra. A team of WHO experts visited Wuhan in harsh conditions in January 2021. The Juan market had been cleared and disinfected quickly after the first cases were detected in the central Chinese city, complicating the investigation into the origin of the virus. [File: Thomas Peter/Reuters] Late last year, Butler was commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program to write a report entitled Environmental Change and COVID-19: The Risk of Future Pandemics in Asia and the Pacific. In the study, Butler listed medical and laboratory procedures as risk factors that could allow viruses to escape a controlled environment and spread widely. For example, China allows coronavirus experiments in low-biosafety environments that require only protective equipment for laboratory workers, a sink, and an eye wash station. Given that the origins of a 1979 coal epidemic in the former Soviet Union that killed at least 66 people were only revealed after the country collapsed in 1992, Butler says he believes the truth about the current pandemic will remain buried by the current Chinese leadership. “China is not going to be open to this under the current regime,” he said.
“I take sides”
In the first months of the pandemic, in April 2020, Australia was one of the first countries to request an independent inquiry into the origin of COVID-19. However, other countries, most notably the United States, did not respond to Canberra’s call. “I am absolutely convinced that many people are not transparent enough – not only in China but also in the United States,” Butler added. In the US, molecular biologist Alina Chan shares Butler’s suspicions. Chan, a scientific adviser at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, was among the first scientists to advocate rejecting a laboratory leak as a source of the virus. The SARS animal hosts were detected within months almost 20 years ago [File: AFP] Last November, along with British science writer Matt Ridley, Chan co-authored Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 and set out evidence for two of the virus’ most likely origins: through an animal carrier in nature or a laboratory accident. In a poll last summer, a majority of Americans, regardless of political beliefs, said they believed the virus came from a laboratory leak in China. Even so, Chan says, the impetus for research has been hampered by partisan politics in Washington. “Everyone is taking a side and trying to bring down the other side,” Chan told Al Jazeera. “It’s not fantastic to say there is a cover-up.” For Chan and all those who argue that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have come from a laboratory, since an animal host that had transmitted the bat virus to humans could not be identified, the natural-origin scenario does not have the scientific support needed. Also, the widespread observation that from the beginning the virus has unique characteristics that made it highly adapted to the mass infection of humans continues to confuse even experts on coronaviruses. “Evidence of the natural origin of SARS1 and MERS was quickly found despite the less advanced technologies at the time. However, for SARS2, we have not yet found any infected animals that could transmit the virus to humans on the market and we have not gathered data to tell us when and how the virus spread to Wuhan before mid-December 2019. said Chan. he said. China is currently battling the worst outbreak of COVID-19 since the initial cases in Wuhan were identified with millions confined to their homes in Shanghai. [Hector Retamal/AFP] Last month, new studies – one of the most detailed published to date on the origin of the virus – identified the market as the “clear focus” of the pandemic, given the nature and grouping of cases. One of the documents, pending peer review, suggested that the first known cases of COVID-19 were detected near Huanan and that in November 2019 the virus had already spread from bats to other mammals and spread to the western corner of the market where live animals were kept and sold. Virologist Marion Koopmans, who was part of the WHO team of experts traveling to China, said the study, led by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, provided “convincing evidence” that the market was indeed , or the place where it all started. But Chan and other scientists say the documents were based on incomplete data and biased samples. And for scientists finding out how the virus spread – especially in the early days – the lack of data available from China has proved particularly challenging.
Danger of development
Hoping to spot the pandemic early last spring, virologist Jesse Bloom at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle tried to get his hands on the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences from the first cases outside China – only to found the data had been removed from the open access site maintained by the US National Institutes of Health at the request of Chinese researchers. As data holders, scientists have the right to request their removal without having to justify it. For example, Bloom said that if the Wuhan Institute of Virology released its entire database of bat coronaviruses, it would be of great help in resolving the issue if one of its laboratories was the source. Without this information, he says, research can not be solved scientifically. “It’s an important question to understand the origins of the pandemic,” Bloom said. “And the public would like a more scientific explanation.” Earlier this month, Bloom and 17 other scientists signed a letter asking China to publish sequence data from samples collected in the market. Whether the virus was transmitted from animals or through a laboratory, Rosemary McFarlane, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Canberra, says much can be done to prevent the risk of another epidemic. This is because both scenarios show the long-term problems with the way humans handle wildlife. Keeping them close to trade and transit has exacerbated the possibility of transmitting viruses between animals and humans. “We can continue to talk about the origin of this pandemic, but we need to understand the dangers now, as the virus is circulating among people with low access to vaccination and among those close to animals. “All of this provides opportunities for the virus to spread further,” McFarlane said. This pandemic “is a wake-up call for the possibility of future danger.”
