Will China hobble WHO’s ‘last-chance’ bid to solve Covid origins mystery?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has enlisted a new team of scientists for a final attempt at solving the puzzle of how the Covid-19 outbreak began.

In a “significant change in approach” by the global health body to “one of the most politically sensitive issues of the pandemic”, the 26-strong “advisory board” will be “devoted to understanding the origins of the coronavirus”, said The Washington Post.

Previous efforts to “​​get to the bottom of the virus’s origins have been stymied by reluctance from Beijing and mired in fraught international politics”, the paper added. But the WHO remains determined to answer “the big, unresolved question of the novel coronavirus - how did it first infect humans?”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

‘Last chance’

The newly enlisted scientists “were chosen from a field of more than 700 applications and are drawn from a range of scientific disciplines”, said The Guardian.

According to a statement released by the WHO on Wednesday, “there will now be a two-week public consultation period” on the proposed members of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (Sago), before the project kicks off.

The proposed team includes Christian Drosten, head of Berlin’s Institute of Virology; Yungui Yang of the Beijing Institute of Genomics; Jean-Claude Manuguerra of France’s Institut Pasteur; and Inger Damon from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some of the experts were also part of the 2020 joint WHO-China scientific mission investigating the origins of Covid-19, including England’s former deputy chief medical officer John Watson.

The WHO’s technical lead on Covid, Maria Van Kerkhove, said the group was likely to “recommend further studies in China and potentially elsewhere” to trace the origins of the pandemic.

Michael Ryan, the body’s emergencies director, added that the investigation may mark the “last chance to understand the origins of this virus”.

Enlisted less than a year after the launch of the joint WHO-China probe, the Sago team represent “an attempt by the embattled global health body to reset its approach to determining how the pandemic began”, said The New York Times (NYT).

That first investigation was “entangled in geopolitics and trailed by concerns over Beijing’s influence”, the paper continued. But the WHO is “trying to inoculate its latest efforts from the slightest hints of undue deference toward China”.

The new study is “bound to face renewed obstacles” though, Bloomberg said.

Following the unveiling of the Sago team, China’s ambassador to the UN, Chen Xu, told reporters that the scientists’ work should not be “politicised”.

“If we are going to send teams to any other places, I believe it’s not to China because we have received international teams twice already,” he said. “It’s time to send teams to other places.”

In August, China “rejected the WHO’s calls for a renewed inquiry on the ground into the origins of Covid-19”, said The Guardian. And Chen’s comments have fuelled concerns that the new team will face further stonewalling from authorities in Beijing.

Scientific stand-off

The WHO’s Van Kerkhove told reporters that the new investigation was “a real opportunity right now to get rid of all the noise, all the politics surrounding this and focus on what we know, what we don’t know and what, urgently, we need to all focus our attention on”.

But “avoiding that noise and politics will be difficult”, The Washington Post said.

Some US experts have suggested that the virus “may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another research institute studying coronaviruses” – claims that Beijing has insisted are “unsupported by a scientific consensus”, the paper added.

Chinese officials have gone “a step further to claim without evidence that the novel coronavirus could have originated outside of China’s borders – even in the US”.

China has “consistently obscured the events around the early coronavirus outbreak”, said Michael Callahan, an infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital, in an article for Politico. And while “this doesn’t automatically mean China was a malicious actor”, Beijing may be “worried about what else turns up along the way” during the latest probe.

Perhaps Covid was the result of “human error in the Wuhan lab, which would injure national pride in China’s top biocontainment facility”, Callahan suggested. But whatever happened, “the impasse shows every sign of continuing”.

The Sago group scientists “will have a mandate to weigh in on the emergence of any new pathogens beyond this novel coronavirus”, said the NYT, an approach aimed at “giving it a permanence that could help insulate it from political squabbling and strengthen the WHO’s hand for future outbreaks”.

But according to David Fidler, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, “this new group can do all the fancy footwork it wants, but China’s not going to cooperate”. For Beijing, he told the paper, “all of this continues to look like an attack on China’s response to the pandemic, and there it’s a zero-sum game”.

Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University struck a more upbeat note. “Conflicts of interest of members of the last group put a huge cloud over the head” of the WHO, he said.

But the Sago team are “a committee with a proper charge, and a proper global mandate – none of that happened before”.