According to ‘Nature’, the organization rules out starting phase two of the work as it does not have access to China and the policy that is applied throughout the world
The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its long-awaited scientific investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, it reports. Nature.
The researchers say they are disappointed that the research is not moving forward, because understanding how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus first infected people is important to preventing future outbreaks. But Without access to China, there is little the WHO can do to advance studiesdice a Nature Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Her hands of hers are really tied.”
In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO traveled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes Covid-19 was detected for the first time. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence about when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team published a report in March of that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spreads from bats to people, possibly via an intermediate species. The first phase was designed to lay the groundwork for a second to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.
But two years after that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase two plans. “There is no phase two,” he told Nature Maria Van Kerkhove, Epidemiloga de la OMS and Ginebra. The international organization planned for the work to be done in phases, he said, but “that plan has changed.”. “The politics that apply around the world have really hampered progress in understanding origins,” she said.
Researchers are working to pin down a timeline for the initial spread of the virus. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China for viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2; experimental studies to help narrow down which animals are susceptible to the virus and could be hosts; and evidence of archived blood and sewage samples collected around the world in late 2019 and early 2020. But the researchers say that too much time has passed to collect some of the data needed to identify where the virus originated.
tense times
Many researchers are not surprised that the WHO’s plans have been thwarted. In early 2020, members of then-US President Donald Trump’s administration made unsubstantiated claims that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory, and intelligence officials later said they had launched investigations. The city of Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security laboratory that works with coronaviruses. Chinese officials questioned whether the virus originated within the country’s borders.
Amid the growing hostility between the two superpowers, WHO member states requested in May 2020 that the agency organize a scientific effort to identify how the pandemic began. Although China agreed to the mission, tensions were high when the WHO group left for Wuhan, and engagement with China quickly crumbled.
In their March 2021 report, the team concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus would accidentally escape from a laboratory. But the inclusion of the laboratory incident scene in the final report was a key point of contention for Chinese researchers and officials, he tells Nature Dominic Dwyer, a virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, who was a member of the WHO team.
That July, the WHO sent a circular to member states outlining how it planned to advance studies of origins. Proposed steps included assessment of wildlife markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supply those markets, as well as audits of laboratories in the area where the first cases were identified.
But Chinese officials rejected the WHO plans and especially opposed the proposal to investigate laboratory violations. Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said the WHO proposal was not agreed by all member states and the second phase should not focus on pathways that the mission report had already deemed extremely unlikely.
In August 2021, members of the original mission team posted a comment on Nature urging swift action on proposed studies to trace the origins of the virus. “We wrote that article because we were concerned that phase two wouldn’t happen,” says Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, and a member of the mission to Wuhan. “I’m sorry to say that’s what turned out.”
job stalled
Gerald Keusch, associate director of the National Laboratory Institute for Emerging Infectious Diseases at Boston University in Massachusetts, says that the global community mishandled the origins investigation. China mishandled it. The WHO handled it badly.” The WHO should have been ruthless in creating a positive working relationship with the Chinese authorities, Keusch says; if he was being obstructed, he should have been honest about it.
Van Kerkhove says that the WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has continued to engage directly with Chinese government officials to encourage China to be more open and share data. And WHO staff have contacted the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing to try to establish collaborations. “We really want to be able to work with our colleagues there,” says Van Kerkhove. “It’s really a deep frustration.”
As he assures Nature In its briefing, China’s foreign ministry did not respond to email requests for comment on why phase two studies have stalled. .
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