COVID's Elusive Origins : WHO Report

 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Fabrice Coffrini/AFP

"Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy."

"[The international expert team had] expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data [while in China]."

"[The report also] raises further questions that will need to be addressed by further studies."

"I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing."

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization

 

Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus arrive by car at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP)

"I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory escape."

"Other people don't believe that, that's fine, science will eventually figure it out."

Robert Redfield, virologist, former head, Centres for Disease Control

"[The Institute saw] no disruptions or incidents."

"[A formal audit of the laboratory was] far beyond what our team is mandated to do or has the tools and capabilities to do."

"The fact that we assessed this hypothesis [that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab] as extremely unlikely doesn't mean it's ruled out."

Peter Ben Embarek, WHO investigative team

"We were allowed to ask whatever questions we wanted, and we got answers. The only evidence that people have for a lab leak is that there is a lab in Wuhan."

"A thousand samples [of animals sold at the Huanan market when the WHO investigative team took samples from 188 animals of 18 species at the market, all of which tested negative] is a great start, but there’s more to do."

WHO team member Peter Daszak

Animal markets like this one in China could be a source of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the WHO report.   Credit: Eric Lafforgue/Art In All Of Us/Corbis via Getty

The World Health Organization's investigative team of ten travelled to Wuhan, China for the express purpose of conducting an unbiased, scientific survey of any available evidence in an attempt to determine the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that swept the world when it first surfaced as a strange new pneumonia-like pathogen deadlier and more infectious than most viruses that erupt from time to time in the East and spread eventually worldwide. The WHO team had plenty of local assistance in their diligent search for answers during their two-week stay.

There were quite a few interviews and on-site examinations, bearing in mind that the team had to first isolate on arriving in China before they could proceed. With them throughout their investigative exercise was a matching team of Chinese scientists to give them aid and direction, some 17 in number. The People's Republic of China was deeply and sincerely invested in the search for the origins of the novel coornavirus, making certain that at all times the WHO researchers were escorted by Chinese officialdom.

WHO microbiologists and medical researchers fully intended to do a thorough and creditable job of searching for answers while conducting interviews under constant supervision in the presence of government officials. Needless to say every individual who was questioned to gain a wider and more full understanding of what had occurred would have been under a certain level of constraint, testifying under the fixed scrutiny of government agents. In their minds no doubt, the fate of Li Wenliang accused of 'spreading harmful rumours' when he first alerted his colleagues to the presence of a threatening new virus. Before he himself died of COVID.

"It's essentially a highly-chaperoned, highly-curated study tour ... this group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see", explained Jamie Metzl, former senior adviser to then-U.S.President Bill Clinton. What is known is simply that a novel coronavirus erupted from some source within walking distance of the high-security laboratory under the aegis of the Wuhan Institute of Virology specializing in the study of coronaviruses. It is also known that the laboratory is located not far from the wild animal 'wet' market where both domestic animals and exotic animals were sold, dead and alive.

And it was the market that Chinese authorities pointed to as the unfortunate source of cross-species, animal-to-human viral vector. These wet markets exist throughout Asia where an insatiable appetite for exotic animals like bats, snakes, pangolins and many other creatures can be satisfied. Crossing the species barrier for pathogens is rare, but it does happen. It did with AIDS and we know what agony that led to throughout the world.

"We could show the virus was circulating in the market as early as December 2019."

"A lot of good leads were suggested in this report, and we anticipate that many, if not all of them, will be followed through because we owe it to the world to understand what happened, why and how to prevent it from happening again."

Peter Ben Embarek,  co-leader, WHO investigative team

Long before the novel coronavirus was identified, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had come in for lax safety regulation criticism when a U.S. team of scientists had visited the premises and felt alarm at the situation prevailing there. That very same laboratory is involved in a security breach that took place in Canada's own National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg when a high-profile Chinese scientist and her husband, both employed there, were escorted from the lab never to return. Involved in an unauthorized transfer of highly sensitive biological samples from there to the Wuhan lab.

The team of WHO investigators appear to have reached the conclusion through a joint report that a lab escape of the coronavirus was to be regarded as "extremely unlikely" following a brief examination of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Four hours were spent at the facility by the WHO team, the investigation limited to interviews with laboratory staffers where the investigators were informed that no disruptions or incidents occurred, and nor did the WHO investigators request collaborative documentation.

The Beijing government appears to have withheld case data from outside investigators, the WHO team no exception. China, it would appear, deigned not to honour a request to turn over 174 health records from the first patients in Wuhan to contract COVID-19: "They showed us a couple of examples, but that's not the same as doing all of them, which is standard epidemiological investigation", explained Dominic Dwyer of the WHO team.

What the WHO team reported was that 92 cases of Wuhan patients exhibiting COVID-like symptoms were documented in October of 2019, quite a few weeks before the officially recognized first cases were reported by the Chinese government. The investigators were given Chinese assurances that serological tests indicated no link to COVID-19.