WHO investigators should eliminate plans for interim report on investigating the origins of Covid-19

The appeal comes at a time when the United States – which recently reversed its decision to leave WHO – is lobbying for greater transparency in the investigation, saying it is waiting to examine the report on Wuhan’s mission and urging China to release all the data relevant, including the first confirmed infections in December 2019, and possible previous infections.

Meanwhile, Beijing is pushing for similar WHO-led missions in other countries, including the U.S., to investigate whether the virus may have originated outside of China and spread to Wuhan through frozen food packaging.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on February 12 that the team would release an interim report summarizing Wuhan’s mission, possibly the following week, with a full report weeks later. But that summary report has not yet been published and the WHO team is now dismissing that plan, said Peter Ben Embarek, the food safety scientist who led the team. The WHO team plans to publish a summary along with the full final report, he said. This final report “will be published in the coming weeks and will include the main findings,” said a WHO spokesman.

“By definition, a summary report does not contain all the details,” said Dr. Ben Embarek. “So, from there [is] so much interest in this report, just a summary would not satisfy the readers’ curiosity. “

The delay in publishing the findings and recommendations of the Wuhan mission, conducted in conjunction with Chinese scientists and officials who will have to approve any report, arises in a scenario of continuing political and scientific controversy surrounding the search for the origins of the pandemic.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China described the open letter as “old wine in new bottles”, which was to blame and lacked scientific credibility, and said Wuhan’s mission concluded that a laboratory source was “extremely unlikely” and did not deserve more research. Neither the Foreign Ministry nor China’s national health commission responded to requests for comment on Wuhan’s mission report.

According to an early copy of the open letter, the group of 26 scientists and other experts in areas such as virology, zoology and microbiology said it was “almost impossible” for the WHO team to conduct a full investigation, and that any report was likely to involve political commitments, since it had to be approved by the Chinese side.

A reliable investigation required, among other things, confidential interviews and more complete access to hospital records of confirmed and potential Chinese coronavirus cases in late 2019, when the outbreak was first identified in Wuhan, says the letter signed by experts from France , United States and India, Australia and other countries.

Investigators should also be allowed to view the records, including maintenance, personnel, animal husbandry and experiment records from all laboratories working with coronavirus, the letter said.

“We cannot allow an investigation into the origins of the pandemic that is not absolutely complete and reliable,” said the letter. “The efforts so far are not a complete, reliable and transparent investigation.”

The appeal is unlikely to gain momentum, as any further investigations will require Beijing’s cooperation. In addition, many leading infectious disease experts are skeptical that a laboratory accident could explain the origins of the pandemic.

Still, it expresses what has become a more widely shared dissatisfaction, expressed by the US and UK governments and by many scientists around the world, that China has provided very little information and data to WHO to guide researchers trying to determine where the virus originated and how it bounced on humans.

“China was not fully and effectively transparent at the beginning of this crisis, when it was more important, or even today, as investigations are moving forward to try to find out what happened,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in an interview with PBS on Wednesday.

China has repeatedly said it is fully cooperating with WHO and has denied claims, including from Trump administration officials, that the virus may have come from a research center in Wuhan, at least one of which specializes in bat coronavirus.

During the mission last month, the WHO team said its Chinese members and colleagues looked at the main hypotheses to determine where future research should focus. At the end of the mission, the team’s leaders said they would request studies on the ways in which the virus could have spread from different small mammals and would not recommend further research into a potential laboratory accident, a theory they considered “extremely unlikely”.

This conclusion was welcomed by Beijing, as well as by scientists in several countries who argue that the virus spread naturally – probably from bats, then possibly through another animal, to humans – and dismiss the laboratory hypothesis as a politically motivated stain.

Since returning from China, however, some of the WHO researchers have qualified their conclusions, saying they had no mandate, experience or data for a full audit of any laboratory. The team also lacked important data about the first confirmed cases, or about hospitalized patients with similar symptoms previously.

A laboratory accident “is definitely not out of the question,” said Dr. Ben Embarek at a seminar last week. Dr. Tedros said in February, after the team’s trip, that “all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis”.

Most signatories to the open letter are members of a larger group, led by French scientists, who have shared research work and other information about Covid-19 since December. None is associated with the WHO investigation.

Signatories include Etienne Decroly and Bruno Canard, molecular virologists at the AFMB Lab, belonging to the Aix-Marseille University and the French National Center for Scientific Research, France’s state research agency.

Dr. Decroly said he became involved after concluding that, based on the available data, it was impossible to determine whether SARS-CoV-2 “is the result of a zoonosis of a wild viral strain or an accidental escape of experimental strains”.

The letter was co-organized by Gilles Demaneuf, a French data scientist based in New Zealand, and Jamie Metzl, a senior researcher at the Atlantic Council and a WHO consultant for editing the human genome.

Prominent critics of the laboratory hypothesis have in recent weeks published new research on bat coronaviruses found in Southeast Asia and Japan that they say shows that SARS-CoV-2 probably evolved naturally to infect humans.

Robert Garry, a virologist at the Tulane University School of Medicine who was involved in this research, said that he and other colleagues initially considered the possibility of a leak or accident in a laboratory, but in the end they considered it “almost impossible”.

The Biden government has not publicly repeated its predecessor’s specific claims about Wuhan’s laboratories.

Signatories to the open letter say they do not support any hypothesis, but think it is premature to exclude the possibility of a leak or accident in or connected to a research center such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, which works well. security labs and conducted extensive research on bat coronavirus.

The WIV scientists deny that the virus came from there, saying that they did not store or work on SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic and that none of its employees tested positive for the virus.

The signatories said that investigators should look at several possible scenarios, including whether a laboratory worker was infected with a naturally evolving virus while collecting bat samples in the wild, during the transport of infected animals or during the disposal of laboratory waste.

They also said that researchers should probe whether SARS-CoV-2 could have originated from “function gain” experiments, in which viruses found in nature are genetically manipulated to see if they can become more infectious or deadly to humans. humans.

Write to Drew Hinshaw at [email protected] and Jeremy Page at [email protected]