A small group of scientists and others who believe the new coronavirus that sparked the pandemic may have originated from a laboratory leak or accident is calling for an independent investigation by the team of independent experts from the World Health Organization sent to China last month.
While many scientists involved in researching the origins of the virus continue to claim that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic almost certainly started with a leap from bats to an intermediate animal to humans, other theories persist and have gained new visibility with the WHO team visit experts to China. WHO officials said in recent interviews that it was “extremely unlikely”, but not impossible, that the spread of the virus was linked to a laboratory accident.
The open letter, first reported in The Wall Street Journal and the French publication Le Monde, lists what the signatories see as failures in the joint WHO-China survey and states that it could not adequately address the possibility of the virus leaking from a laboratory. . The letter also presents the type of investigation that would be appropriate, including full access to records within China.
The WHO mission, like everything involving China and the coronavirus, was political from the beginning, as members of the international team recognized.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and one of the scientists who signed the letter, said it emerged from a series of online discussions between scientists, policy experts and others who have come to be known informally as the Paris group. Many of those who signed the letter resided in France and Dr. Ebright, who spoke openly about the need to investigate a possible laboratory leak, said that such a discussion was less vigorous in the United States.
He said that no one in the group thought the virus had been created intentionally as a weapon, but everyone was convinced that an origin in a laboratory through research or accidental infection was as likely as an overflow occurring in the nature of animals for humans.
Dr. Ebright said the letter was released because the Paris group hoped to see a WHO interim report on Thursday. The letter, he added, “was communicated to senior WHO officials on Tuesday.”
Asked to respond to the letter, Tarik Jasarevic, WHO spokesman, replied in an email that the team of experts who had gone to China “is working on its full report, as well as a summary report, which we understand will be issued simultaneously in a few weeks. “
The open letter noted that the WHO study was a joint effort by a team of external experts, selected by the global health organization, who worked with Chinese scientists, and that the team’s report must be approved by everyone. The letter emphasized that the team did not have access to some records and did not investigate laboratories in China.
The team’s conclusions, the letter stated, “while potentially useful to some extent, do not represent WHO’s official position or the result of an independent and unrestricted investigation.”
Without mentioning it, the letter criticized Peter Daszak, a specialist in animal diseases and his connection to human health, who runs EcoHealth International. The letter contained links to articles about Dr. Daszak and said that he had already stated his belief that the virus’s natural origin was more likely.
Dr. Daszak said the letter’s impetus to investigate the virus’s origin in the laboratory was a position “supported by political agendas”.
“I strongly urge the global community to wait for the publication of the WHO mission report,” he added.
Filippa Lentzos, senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, and one of the signatories to the letter, said: “I think that in order to get a reliable investigation, it has to be one more global effort in the sense that it should be brought to the Assembly UN General, where all the nations of the world are represented and can vote whether or not the UN Secretary-General is given a mandate to carry out this type of investigation. “
Dr. David A. Relman, professor of medicine and microbiology at Stanford University and a member of the intelligence community studies council at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, an advisory body to the federal government, said he was “quite favorable ”From the open letter.
“I totally agree, based on what we know so far, that the WHO investigation appears to be biased, distorted and insufficient,” he said by email. “Most importantly, without full transparency and access to primary data and records, we cannot understand the basis for any of the comments issued so far on behalf of the investigation or by WHO”
At the same time, scientists working with coronavirus continue to dig up and report evidence to support the natural evolution and overflow of the virus by animals.
Robert F. Garry, a virologist at Tulane University Medical Center, recently posted on the Virological website a report that has not yet been peer-reviewed, describing new evidence that aspects of the virus that seemed unusual at first were found in new viruses in Japan, Thailand and Cambodia. He and his co-authors concluded: “These observations are consistent with the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 and strongly inconsistent with a laboratory origin”.
He said he was familiar with some of the signatories’ opinions of the letters expressed in previous appearances in the media or on social media, involving speculation about the ways in which the virus could have come from laboratory work, and that none of those opinions appeared in the letter.
Dr. Garry said that the possible scenarios described in the letter were that “the Wuhan Institute of Biology had SARS-CoV-2 or something very close to that before the outbreak. And for some reason, some big conspiracy, they just didn’t want to tell anyone about it. “
He said he continued to believe that a laboratory source was “almost impossible”. He said, “We need to look at animals.”
This seems to get to the heart of the Paris group’s concerns, which is the nature of future research. Dr. Ebright said everyone in the group was concerned about the potential for increased wildlife surveillance and laboratory research on viruses, not lessening the likelihood of future pandemics.
If collecting samples in the wild or working with these samples in laboratories were implicated in the origin of the pandemic, he said, it would be urgent “to assess whether the benefits outweigh the risks and if not to restrict these activities”.
William J. Broad contributed reporting.