WASHINGTON — The World Health Organization is denying a report by a top science journal that it had “quietly suspended” an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
But that denial itself only highlighted the challenges for such an investigation, especially given China’s continued reluctance to allow access to sites that may hold clues to how the pandemic started.
The controversy began with a report published Tuesday by the prestigious scientific journal Nature: “WHO is abandoning plans for crucial second phase of COVID origin research.” There would apparently be no follow-up to the WHO’s spring 2021 report on how the pandemic started, the article said, due to the inability to “carry out critical investigations in China.”
The report should have been the first phase of the investigation. But as WHO infectious disease expert Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the global agency’s pandemic response, told Nature, “There’s no phase two.”
However, WHO officials were quick to protest that the investigation had not been called off. The report was “completely misleading,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jašarević told Yahoo News in an email on Wednesday.
The row highlights how little is still known about how SARS-CoV-2 originated — a world-changing event that remains a mystery three years later. Because so much time has passed, the hotly debated question of whether the pathogen originated from a market stall or on a lab bench may remain forever unresolved, especially as much of the world (including China) looks to put the pandemic behind it.
Answers are hard to come by largely because Chinese authorities have steadfastly resisted giving Western researchers the access they’ve been asking for since the early 2020s.
In her comments to Nature, Van Kerkhove acknowledged a “deep frustration” at how difficult it was to rebuild trust with Chinese counterparts, who have become skeptical of outside researchers over the course of the three-year battle against COVID-19.
In the US, a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has sworn Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recently retired immunologist, and other top government officials about what they may have known — and what they may have missed — about risky research that some believe could have led to the start of the pandemic.
Last month, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services accused the National Institutes of Health of failing to adequately monitor U.S. funds to support research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through an intermediary organization, the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance. .
EcoHealth Alliance head Peter Daszak has been one of the strongest critics of the lab leak hypothesis, even though he hid his own ties to Chinese researchers. He was controversially part of the WHO team that traveled to Wuhan in early 2021 during the first phase of the investigation.
WHO spokesman Jašarević told Yahoo News this week that while there would indeed be no “phase two” of the original coronavirus study, a WHO panel, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins on Novel Pathogens (SAGO), would continue to look for answers to how the pandemic had started.
Still, Jašarević acknowledged that limitations remained. “We have repeatedly and publicly said that the origins must be investigated,” he wrote, “and China must provide access and information for this to happen – and if this does not happen, efforts to understand the origins will remain rather hampered.”
Those difficulties were partly due, Nature suggested, because then-President Donald Trump had made “baseless claims” that the virus came from a Chinese laboratory.
Trump’s claims were initially denounced as xenophobic and conspiratorial, but have since gained support as experts gradually recognized that the so-called lab leak hypothesis is a plausible explanation. However, the scientific consensus generally supports the idea that COVID-19 originated via zoonosis, or animal-to-human transmission, just like previous viruses, including HIV and Ebola.
“The politics around the world of this really hindered understanding the origins,” Van Kerkhove lamented in her interview with Nature.
Other experts quoted in the article blamed the West for defaming China and trading conspiracy theories. One of those experts, outspoken virologist Angela Rasmussen, then summed up her thoughts on Twitter. “By demonizing and alienating colleagues in China rather than building collective trust, this is what the relentlessly toxic lab leak conspiracy machine has delivered: the complete and utter disintegration of any meaningful further research into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 ,” she wrote.
The first phase of the WHO investigation included what remains the only authorized visit by Western researchers to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic is believed to have started almost everywhere.
But the resulting report was criticized for failing to consider more seriously the hypothesis that the virus originated in a lab as a result of an accident amid controversial “gain of function” research that pushes pathogens to study how they are produced in the nature to evolve. .
Several months later, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged it was “premature” to rule out the lab leak hypothesis.
Tuesday’s article in Nature initially seemed like a concession of defeat, prompting renewed criticism of WHO’s efforts to pressure China for more information about the research it conducted in Wuhan.
Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist, accused the WHO on Twitter of “utter failure in its responsibility to the global public.” description of the first efforts as “a failed simulacrum of an investigation.”
Wednesday afternoon saw a more forceful denial from Van Kerkhove himself, in what appeared to be an admission by WHO officials that they had been caught in a PR storm. During a briefing with members of the press, she described the Nature article as a “misreporting error” that misrepresented her words. “In a sense, Phase 2 became SAGO,” which she described as “our best effort to move this work forward.”
Van Kerkhove also said WHO will continue to pressure China to be more accessible with on-site access. “We continue to ask for more collaboration and collaboration with our colleagues in China to advance studies that need to take place in China,” she said at the briefing.
“We have not dropped any plans. We have not stopped any work,” she said, although she acknowledged that investigating its origins was “increasingly difficult” due to the amount of time that has passed since the first cases of the coronavirus were recorded in China more than three years ago.
Still, nature stood by the first article. “The journalists at Nature are in talks with the World Health Organization about their concerns about our article. We are committed to maintaining the highest standards in journalism and take accuracy very seriously,” Nature communications director Lisa Boucher told Yahoo News.
Skeptics saw the whole back-and-forth as evidence of confused priorities. “The article, and the responses to it, seem to shed little light on who is in control and why they are in control,” mathematical biologist Alex Washburne wrote in a text message to Yahoo News.
China’s reluctance to open its laboratories to Western inspectors is a sign to some that a cover-up is in the making, Washburne added. “If this wasn’t coming from a lab in China, China could certainly rule out the involvement of its own labs,” Washburne told Yahoo News. “I can’t imagine a good reason for China not to share that information.”
Washburne was also concerned when the WHO appointed Jeremy Farrar as chief scientist late last month.
Farrar was one of several signatories to a letter – written by Daszak and distributed to prominent medical and public health experts – published in the Lancet in the early days of the pandemic expressing “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.”
The letter strongly condemned the idea that the coronavirus could have come from a lab. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories that suggest COVID-19 has no natural origin,” the letter said.
The Lancet later added a disclosure detailing Daszak’s ties to China.
