Concerns about the China WHO Joint Study or: Why we don’t know more than before?
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik and Hanspeter Schwarz, Vienna
April 11 , 2021
On March 26, 2021, CNN broadcasted a documentary called Autopsy of a pandemic. 6 doctors at the center of the US Covid 19 response. One of the six doctors who was interviewed by CNN chief medical correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta was Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) under the Trump administration. Redfield astonished his interviewer by voicing a personal opinion about the origin of the pandemic. He said: I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, escaped. The other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. While this remark seems to have remained unnoticed by European media it was presented as a change of narrative in the US and discussed quite intensively in East Asia. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, the idea that the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was not immediately rejected and disdained as conspiracy theory.
The study insists: A laboratory origin of the pandemic is considered to be extremely unlikely
The documentary was released shortly before the Joint WHO-China Study was published on March 30, 2021. The 120-page document summarizes the findings of the investigation team which the WHO had sent to China at the beginning of the year and which collaborated with Chinese scientists to identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population, including the possible role of intermediate hosts. With regard to the lab incident hypotheses it stated that a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely. Instead, the report found the explanation that either direct zoonotic transmission, zoonotic transmission by an intermediate host or through the cold/food chain were more likely. Zoonotic transmission by an intermediate host was assessed as being most likely and the transmission by deep frozen food – a hypothesis repeated by Chinese media arguing that the virus was introduced to China from other countries – regarded as possible. The leader of the international team Peter Ben Embarek, stated in an interview given after the return of the experts from China with regard to the lab accident hypotheses: It’s not something we’re going to pursue in the coming weeks and months. But our assessment is out there, and the topic is on the table. This is to me a big achievement, because for the past year it was mission impossible to even discuss it or even put it on the table or on the agenda of any meeting or discussion.
He describes in quite some detail how the team came to the assessment and makes clear that the investigation on this point was highly informal, yet well prepared from the Chinese side as everybody who was supposed to have worked in the WIV at the time was tested negative on any sign of infection with the COVID-19 virus. Embarek did not mention the possibility that they did not meet everybody working in the WIV at the time and that materials had been prepared to make sure the lab accident hypothesis was highly unlikely. But according to his interview with Science he was at least aware of the fact that politics was always in the room.
The reasons given for the lab hypothesis assessed as extremely unlikely mention the high bio-safety standards executed by the WIV and the inability to find any reports or evidences on a lab incident having taken place. However, during a press conference in China Dr. Dwyer, another member of the team, said: the team did not see anything during the visit to suggest a lab accident. Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn´t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice. Indeed, there was no expert on bio-safety, bio-technology or protein engineering on the team. Nevertheless, Peter Ben Embarek, a food safety expert and former advisor on food safety and nutrition issues to the Chinese Government, voiced the opinion that the lab looked in good conditions to me.
The high bio-safety standards of the WIV are questionable. The party secretary of the institute who acted as spokesperson during the early months of the pandemic, Yuan Zhimin, published an article in 2019 deploring the low safety standards to be found in laboratories across China. Neither the WHO nor any independent international organization has up to now certified the WIV as a so called P4m lab (BioSafety Level 4) of highest security standards, and the reluctance of the French scientists to continue their collaboration with the WIV also seems to be based on security concerns. In addition, the US embassy which had visited the Wuhan lab several times before the outbreak of the pandemic because US money was sponsoring Corona virus research in Wuhan reported back that the bio-safety situation was extremely unsatisfactory. According to a Washington Post article, additional funding and support by biosafety specialists from the US was asked for and the danger of a lab accident in the lab described as extremely high. The Trump administration decided not to augment its financial support and instead stopped the transfer of funding to the WIV. Three separate fatal laboratory incidences with SARS-CoV are reported to have taken place in Singapore, Taiwan and Beijing in 2003 and 2004. This shows that laboratory handling of live SARS-CoV are potential sources of infection and very strict adherence to effective biosafety practices is important.
Finally, we have to keep in mind that the delegation was allowed to enter China only one year after the outbreak of the epidemic was made public. The fact that after such a long time no data was available showing that an incident had taken place or that lab workers had been infected with pneumonia is not astonishing. As we know, the 17 non-Chinese members of the delegation did not have access to any raw data or notebooks and none of them was able to read Chinese language materials or to interview lab workers without the presence of an interpreter. Given the fact that the WIV must have been highly interested in making the lab accident hypothesis seem most unlikely we cannot expect more than we had known before from the investigations undertaken and reported by the Joint WHO-China Study. This might be the reason why the lab accident hypothesis was rated more likely than assessed in the Joint report by the WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. During the press conference dedicated to the Study he underlined the necessity to pursue further research in this direction. The CNN documentary presenting what its author called a total change of narrative supported this idea.
A change of narrative?
In fact, CDC Director Redfield’s narrative is not new at all. Ever since the pandemic had reached beyond its city of origin, Wuhan, scientists and some politicians as well as the interested public have been interested in knowing what the origin of the pandemic might have been. Former US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo had voiced his opinion on the possible lab accident several times, and former US President Donald Trump is known to have called COVID-19 the Wuhan Virus. In January 2021, the US senate officially took the stain of conspiracy theory off the lab accident hypothesis. Dr. Redfield’s change of narrative was carefully prepared.
What is less known is the fact that once the idea of a lab accident came up scientists from around the world were asked to sign an open letter stating: The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),1 and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens. Interestingly, the initiative to have this open letter published by the renowned journal The Lancet was launched by Peter Daszak, the president of the US based EcoHealth Alliance which had received funding from the NIH to support research on the Corona virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Daszak describes his collaboration with the WIV on the mass sampling of bats in China in an article published in The Guardian in vivid colours claiming that EcoHealth Alliance is the only competent research institution around the world which is able to identify where the virus comes from. Peter Daszak has repeatedly rejected the claim that COVID-19 was an engineered virus and tries to contradict the lab accident theory by insinuating that only an engineered virus could have escaped from the lab. Thus, the narrative came into existence which says that everybody who does not exclude the lab accident from the list of possible origins of the pandemic is a follower of conspiracy theories arguing that the Wuhan lab engineered a virus which escaped the lab be it intentionally or not. Asked by the BBC whether or not he would insist on investigating this problem during his trip to Wuhan, Peter Daszak bluntly answered: That’s not my job to do that.
So what kind of accidents might have happened at the WIV? To answer this question, it is not usual practice to assess the genetic and phenotypic characteristics of the virus to which the critics of the lab theory always refer. Instead a thorough investigation of the lab is absolutely necessary. This investigation should follow three possible working hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: The accident occurred while handling a novel naturally evolved Bat Coronavirus. By the publication record of the WIV, we know that it is the WIV`s mission to establish the most comprehensive collection of bat corona viruses. For this purpose, WIV´s key scientist Shi Zhengli has collected countless bat coronaviruses from caves in China and published results of their characterization in top international journals. Multiple passages of isolated corona virus in mammalian cell lines, or inoculation into animals in WIV´s animal laboratories bear the risk of both virus mutation/adaption as well as leakage to the outside. The coronavirus RaTG13, a proposed ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, first discovered in 2013, shares 96.2% genomic similarity with SARS-CoV-2. This coronavirus caused symptoms similar to SARS-CoV-2 and was characterized at the WIV.
Hypothesis 2: Artificial Corona virus construct experiments to increase infectivity and pathogenicity (so called gain-of-function experiments) are of high risk. We know that virus construct experiments were conducted at the WIV because they are published. We also know that other labs temporarily stopped pursuing these experiments because of the implied high risk. The above-mentioned coronavirus RaTG13 could have been used as the backbone for the creation of SARS-COV-2. Based on mutation rate estimates certain laboratory techniques could increase mutation rates building up the 3.8% difference in a shorter time period.
Hypothesis 3: The accident occurred while the lab was working on a chimeric construct of two known or unknown and unpublished viruses. This kind of research is extremely risky and is banned in many places because of the high risk of lab accidents leading to a leakage of the artificial virus to the outside. We cannot know whether these experiments were conducted at the WIV, but the possibility needs to be taken into consideration.
Many observers have asked the question why Peter Daszak has been so active in rejecting the possibility of a lab accident. As a matter of fact, everybody in the field knows that Daszak is a close collaborator of the WIV and its prolific scientist Shi Zhengli. Together with her and other scientists from the WIV he worked on gain-of-function experiments which had been banned in the US under the Obama administration because of the implied high risk. Nevertheless, Yuan Zhimin, the director of the WIV is quoted by the ORF of having said after the pandemic had occurred that the WIV has no intention nor the knowhow and capabilities to design and construct new corona viruses. The truth is that the first chimeric corona virus construct by scientists for Wuhan was published as early as 2008 in the Journal of Virology. In fact, this is the reason why Wuhan was chosen as the location for China’s top laboratory of Virology and why the WIV is a world leading corona virus research institution and a place many virologists around the world visit and collaborate with. It was built after former PRC president and Party Chair Jiang Zemin had realized after the outbreak of SARS in 2003 that intensive research on Corona virus needed to be undertaken. Jiang opted for an international collaboration, but his first talks with the US were met with hesitation as the US intelligence services regarded the research on Corona virus as too dangerous with regard to its potential military use. Jiang Zemin then approached the French as some of the main researchers working on Corona virus in China had been trained in France. He won the support of the French government for building a completely new lab meeting the highest safety standards. When the lab was finally opened in 2017, high ranking French politicians were present, but the originally intended research collaboration did not develop as planned. Instead, more and more US money flowed into the lab in a situation when Corona virus research in the US was under a moratorium. Under these circumstances, it seems quite understandable that Peter Daszak and other US virologists are not interested in being accused of collaborating with a lab which runs US sponsored high risk research on Corona virus without guaranteeing the necessary safety standards. The best way to avoid any discussions on shared responsibilities for the spread of the pandemic is, of course, to condemn everybody searching for clues on the origin of the pandemic in the WIV as followers of conspiracy theory.
In this vain, the study published by Prof. Dr. Roland Wiesendanger from the University of Hamburg on February 18, 2021 was criticized by the German-language press as if Roland Wiesendanger was a follower of conspiracy theory. The press rejected his study in unison with the same set or arguments we have heard for more than a year. Obviously, the media and the scientists attacking Wiesendanger’s study had not followed the discussions on the other side of the Atlantic and overlooked the fact that under the Biden administration the discussion of the lab accident hypothesis was no longer tabooed. Even the fact that the renowned journal Nature has in the meantime concluded that the probability of a laboratory incidence has increased because of the inability to identify an intermediate host species and given the fact that the WIV has an experimental animal facility was also left unnoticed.
Why can the narrative change now?
But how do we explain that Dr. Redfield waited until leaving his position in the CDC before revealing his personal opinion about a lab accident being the most likely origin of the pandemic? He insinuates in his answer to Dr. Gupta that he was not allowed to voice this opinion while still in office. In East Asia, analysts speculate that a possible statement of a US official on the lab accident hypothesis might have turned US China relations even worse than they already were during the last months of the Trump administration. But they also point to the fact that President Trump’s main adviser during the pandemic, Dr. Fauci, was responsible in the NIH for allowing research funding from the NIH to reach the EcoHealth Alliance and eventually the WIV. As a matter of fact, Fauci had stressed in the past that the majority of scientists in the US believed that the COVID-19 virus was of natural origin and had thus indirectly rejected the lab accident theory. In addition, US intelligence officials also concluded that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified. According to a recent New York Times report, the intelligence officers insisted on this assessment despite pressure from Donald Trump. Their argument was that they did not have enough evidence to run counter the consensus among scientists.
The consensus among scientists seems to be not as overwhelming as it was said to be one year ago. Before the Joint China WHO Study came out, a group of (again) 26 scientists wrote an open letter published simultaneously in the US and in France on March 4, 2021 voicing their doubts about the validity of the investigation the WHO delegation was able to undertake in Wuhan. They pointed to the fact that the research team in Wuhan consisted of 17 non-Chinese and 17 Chinese experts which had to come to a unanimous opinion. Nothing could be published which was vetoed by the Chinese side. In their overall assessment of what had been achieved by the investigation in Wuhan, the signatories of the open letter concluded: Although the joint team investigation was a significant opportunity for the international community to gain some limited and highly curated information, it has unfortunately proven opaque and restrictive, greatly compromising the scientific validity of the investigation. They call for an independent investigation to continue searching for the origin of the pandemic because: If we fail to fully and courageously examine the origins of this pandemic, we risk being unprepared for a potentially worse pandemic in the future.
The Chinese assessment of the report
According to official reports in the PRC, the joint investigation of Chinese and non-Chinese experts was a total success. During the press conference in Beijing on March 30, 2021, four Chinese experts and the leader of the non-Chinese group of experts, Peter Ben Embarek, introduced the Joint Study and underlined that there was no difference whatsoever between the data that the Chinese and the non- Chinese group of experts were knowledgeable of. The research was a joint undertaking. The study was independent, professional, and transparent, and a strong deconstruction of conspiracy theories propelled by some Western politicians. It shows that the research for the origin of the pandemic is serious and urgent research which should not be politicized. The official report on the press conference repeats several times that the lab accident hypotheses was entirely without any factual basis and was therefore refuted by the Joint Study. It also stresses that the joint investigation is dubious about the Huanan Wildlife Market to be the location where the virus was transmitted to humans and caused the first infections, and it repeats that further research into the possibility that the virus was transmitted to Wuhan from a place outside China is important.
Obviously, the Chinese side had reacted to the growing criticism that had been voiced outside China and to the open letter of the scientists asking for an independent and transparent investigation with direct and uncontrollable access to interviewees in China. Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance who was a participant of the investigation team is cited as having said that the joint investigation showed how even under difficult political circumstances it was absolutely necessary to overcome barriers and estrangement between states. Wherever non-Chinese members of the investigation team are cited, it is always Peter Dazsak who stresses the high level of professionality on the side of the Chinese scientists who prepared the reports for the investigation team. Interestingly, the official report on the press conference in Beijing is published on the webpage of the Disciplinary and Control Commission of the CCP Central Committee and the State Supervisory Commission of the PRC. There is reason to believe that these two commissions were responsible for the supervision of the Chinese members of the investigation team. This does not underpin the claim that they could work independently and beyond political constraints.
Political concerns which are voiced belatedly
Meanwhile, after initial disregard for the question of the origin of the pandemic, some 14 countries, including the US, Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Slovenia and the United Kingdom released a joint statement showing concern for the lack of transparency of the Joint China WHO Study. The delayed attention to the question of the origin of the pandemic among the political elites of the West seems to be due to the fact that Australia which first voiced the demand for investigating in Wuhan on the issue was immediately sanctioned by the Chinese government for believing in the possibility of a lab accident causing the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 virus. In addition, it seems that the US has again taken over leadership in organizing this expression of concern after the idea of the lab accident was de- contaminated with the US senate taking a decision in favour of taking this possibility seriously. The list auf signatories shows, however, that only few EU membership countries, and especially none of the big EU membership countries, are supporting the statement.
There is reason to believe that the investigation undertaken by Chinese and non-Chinese experts could have been much more successful for both the Chinese and the non-Chinese side had the international community taken the issue seriously and shown much more concern for the success of the mission as most states did in the past. Not knowing about the origin of the pandemic means that we have great difficulty in understanding the virus thoroughly and in predicting what kind of challenges it is up to. Not insisting on the People’s Republic of China to have a team of international specialists research on this question without any limitations means to bring all scientists involved in the investigation into an awkward position and to leave people inside and outside of the PRC in doubt about whether or not we know everything we can on the origin of the pandemic. The fact that the ever so active media mostly shied away from reporting on the origins of the virus and that the governments of most countries affected by the pandemic decided to turn a blind eye on the importance of the issue has by now created a situation which makes further research with more convincing results highly unlikely. Last but not least, the fact that so many academics around the world believed and actively supported the idea that only followers of conspiracy theory could insist on the necessity to take the lab accident theory seriously clearly does not do honour to what scientists like to call the incorruptibility of the community.