WHO team lands in Wuhan in search of virus origins
A global team of researchers arrived Thursday in the central Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic was first detected to conduct a politically sensitive investigation of its origins, amid uncertainty as to whether Beijing can try to avoid embarrassing discoveries. (January 14)
AP
Robert Redfield, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN on Friday that he believes the virus that causes COVID-19 was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
He offered no explanation for this idea other than to say, as a virologist, he does not believe that the virus could be so contagious when it jumped directly from an animal to a person. Instead, he claims he was manipulated in a Wuhan research lab to become more contagious and then accidentally launched by a worker in September or October 2019, a few months before it reached the public’s attention.
Several scientists said that Redfield’s theory did not pass the scientific test of smell.
“There is a fundamental difference between having a theory and testing a theory and showing evidence that your theory is a fact,” said Paul Duprex, a virologist and director of the vaccine research center at the University of Pittsburgh.
Duprex, who runs a level three biosafety laboratory that deals with dangerous pathogens, said he would never rule out the possibility of human error.
“No open-minded scientist will ever say to you, or should say, ‘this is impossible,” he said. “What a good scientist will say is, ‘Where is the evidence?'”
Duprex said he saw no evidence to suggest that the virus first emerged from a laboratory.
The World Health Organization, which has been investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, considers the laboratory leak scenario so unlikely that it stopped research on that hypothesis.
President Joe Biden on Friday refused to offer his views on the possible origins of the virus.
“I have theories, but I am not a scientist,” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “I will wait until the scientific community makes this judgment.”
W. Ian Lipkin, director of the infection and immunity center at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said he believed the virus jumped directly from animals to people – probably from wildlife farms, which the WHO team found operating in Wuhan.
“This seems to be the most likely and plausible explanation, especially since we have seen so many of these viruses appear in exactly this way,” he said, citing Zika, West Nile and the first SARS virus.
COVID-19 is caused by a virus called SARS-CoV-2, which belongs to the family of coronavirus viruses. Research published last summer in the journal Nature suggested that the virus first evolved in bats and circulated among them for decades before jumping on people, possibly after passing through another animal.
SARS-CoV-2 also moved from humans to mink and vice versa during the pandemic, suggesting that the virus is highly transmissible between species, added Lipkin.
The WHO team examined the laboratory work of several researchers in Wuhan and found “no evidence that any of the laboratories in China were working on this virus before the outbreak”, according to team member and disease expert Peter Daszak from animals to humans, who also worked closely with one of the researchers in Wuhan.
“You cannot prove a negative. You cannot say definitively that it was not happening,” he said. “All you can do is look at what they were doing in that lab. What did they publish from that lab. Did they have viruses that were the potential ancestor of SARS-CoV-2? Again, no evidence of that.”
The final WHO report was released on Friday, but instead it will be made public “very soon,” said Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization that supports global health and pandemic prevention.
Speaking to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, Redfield emphasized that he was expressing his personal opinion, not as a civil servant. Redfield, who trained as a virologist, said he came to believe it because of the speed with which the virus spread.
“I don’t believe it went from a bat to a human and, at that moment when the virus reached the human being, it became one of the most infectious viruses we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission,” Redfield said.
He gave no evidence to support his belief that the virus started circulating in September or October 2019.
A genetic study published earlier this month in the journal Science found that the first person was probably infected between mid-October and mid-November.
“This is not the time to add wild speculation to a global crisis,” said Stephen Morse, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Speculation is not constructive, it does not help us to control the pandemic and it only distracts us from the urgent work and global cooperation we need.”
It has long been known that respiratory coronaviruses can spread efficiently from person to person. Four types of common cold are caused by coronavirus. “We never take them too seriously,” said Morse.
Governments around the world, including the United States, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, made the same mistake, minimizing the virus in the early days, said Morse. They “should have paid more attention to this emerging problem in January 2020. Why didn’t governments coordinate efforts before it was too late?”
Please contact Karen Weintraub at [email protected].
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