Origins of Covid-19: WHO no longer excludes the hypothesis of a laboratory leak

Two and a half years of investigation, and still nothing. Or so little. A team of renowned scientists (composed of experts from the United States, China and from 25 other countries) convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) has been investigating the still unclear origins of Sars-CoV-2 for several months. Their conclusions were published this Thursday, June 9 in a report of about thirty pages. Do we know more about the circumstances that led to the emergence of Covid-19, the most serious pandemic in more than a century? Yes and no. Firstly because the group has, for the moment, only reviewed the research already carried out, and this is only a preliminary report.

The first lesson of this report is the most controversial. Contrary to the first report published in March 2021 by the joint WHO-China team – strongly criticized for its bias towards the Chinese regime -, which immediately eliminated the hypothesis of a laboratory accident, this team affirms that this track requires “additional investigations”. However, there is no new data to support this thesis. Let us recall here that, since the start of the pandemic, scientists have judged a “lab leak” possible, and that evidence leading to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been unearthed over the months, including on Twitter. This hypothesis therefore exists, but it is still far from being proven. If need be to prove the highly political aspect of this issue, members of the group from Brazil, China and Russia opposed calls for further investigation into this theory.

If the hypothesis of a laboratory accident is not proven, what about animal transmission, also called zoonosis? This hypothesis has been favored by a majority of researchers around the world since the start of the pandemic. According to the report, the available data suggests that Sars-CoV-2 has an animal origin, meaning it spreads between animals in natural settings, but neither the animal that infected humans nor the place where this infection occurred cannot currently be identified. For a long time, the Huanan seafood market, located in Wuhan, had been presented as the place of origin of the pandemic. However, we know today that it played an accelerating role in the spread of the virus, but it is not the place where the pandemic started.

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“They have made good progress”

“This is just the beginning,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO epidemiologist and member of the research team, told reporters before the report was published. “They’ve made good progress. They’ve made it clear there’s still work to be done,” she continued. This report, while it does not answer any questions with certainty, has the merit of reviving the debate on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Because, two and a half years after its appearance, no thesis has emerged.

Beijing rejects accusations of a lab leak, and the direct progenitor of Sars-CoV-2 has never been identified in the wild. A virus similar to the latter, called RaTG13 and 96.1% identical, was discovered in a horseshoe bat in a cave in Yunnan, southern China, in 2013; and another in this same species of bat in Laos (with 96.8% resemblance) in Laos in 2020 by a team from the Institut Pasteur, but these are only distant ancestors.

WHO experts have called for numerous studies to be carried out, including tests on wild animals to determine which species could harbor Covid-19. To determine whether Covid-19 could have been the result of a laboratory accident, WHO experts said research should be conducted “with laboratory personnel responsible for managing and implementing biosecurity and biosecurity,” saying it would provide more insight into how the Covid-19-related viruses have been managed. China has previously called the suggestion that Covid-19 started in a lab “baseless” and countered that the virus may have originated from US facilities, which were also known to test animals for coronavirus. The Chinese government has said it supports finding the origins of the pandemic, but other countries should be the focus.

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Last August, scientists linked to the WHO lamented that the search for the origins of the pandemic had stalled and that the window of opportunity was “closing rapidly”. They warned that collecting data that was now at least two years old was increasingly difficult. Without Beijing’s help, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to solve the mystery of the origins of Covid-19. Or it could take years, even decades.