WHO Report Into Covid-19 Origins Leaves Key Questions Unanswered
Long-awaited report says data examined during China mission was insufficient to explain when, where and how virus began spreading
A World Health Organization-led team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic said in a report that data examined during a recent mission to China was insufficient to answer the critical questions of when, where and how the virus began spreading.
The long-awaited report, which has yet to be made public but was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, calls for closer examination of Chinese hospital records and blood samples from before the first known cases in December 2019, as well as more extensive testing of farms that supplied wild animals to a market linked to many early cases.
But the 319-page document, shared with WHO member states ahead of its planned publication on Tuesday, also recommends further studies into evidence, often cited by Chinese authorities, that the virus may have circulated in other countries—including the U.S.—in late 2019, and that it has spread via frozen food.
The report presents the findings of the four-week mission completed earlier this year by a WHO-led team of international experts and their Chinese counterparts in Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the site of the first confirmed coronavirus cases.
The team had little power to conduct a thorough, independent investigation during their trip. China initially resisted international pressure for an inquiry, and later imposed strict limitations, secured China veto rights over participants and expanded its scope to encompass other countries.
The final report represents the attempts by the United Nations agency to find out how a pandemic that has killed 2.8 million people started. Answers could help prevent another pandemic—and satisfy the basic desire to understand how the current one emerged.
Yet the research taps into the sensitive issue of how long the virus was spreading in China before its government reported the disease to the WHO or responded in full. WHO has been caught between Beijing—whose officials have suggested the pandemic may have begun outside China—and Washington, where the Biden administration has raised questions about Beijing’s transparency on the virus’s origins and the integrity of data provided to the WHO-led team.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration was withholding a response to the report while it was reviewed by nearly 20 government experts from various agencies.
“We have been clear that an independent, technically sound investigation is what our focus is on,” she said.
Zhao Lijian, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, defended the report at a regular news briefing on Monday.
“When will the WHO experts be invited to the United States for a visit on origin-tracing?” Mr. Zhao asked, also questioning when they would get access to a U.S. military laboratory where Chinese officials have suggested the virus might have originated.
He said Chinese authorities had provided data of particular concern to the WHO-led team “item by item.”
The final document balanced a proposal for further research into China’s earliest cases while allowing for the possibility that the disease may have started spreading in another country first.
It recommended further scrutiny of how Chinese authorities identified just 92 potential early cases from more than 76,000 respiratory patients in October and November 2019. It called for antibody testing of blood bank samples in Wuhan going back to September 2019, and similar screening elsewhere in China.
But it also suggested further consideration of respiratory-illness data from clinics at the World Military Games in October that year. Chinese officials have suggested that a U.S. delegation to those games might have introduced the virus to Wuhan. Washington has denied that. The annex of the WHO report states that “nothing resembling COVID-19 had been seen” at clinics during those military games.
Citing studies suggesting the virus was spreading in late 2019 in countries including Italy, France, Spain, the U.S. and Brazil, the report said those findings weren’t confirmed and the methods used weren’t standardized. “Nonetheless, it is important to investigate these potential early events,” it said.
“I see the language of diplomacy here more than the language of science,” said Maureen Miller, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Columbia University, who said the report itself was less compelling than the future studies it proposes. “If the research team is not diplomatic it is unlikely they will acquire any further information.”
The report declared that the virus very likely spread from bats and then to humans via another small mammal species such as mink, raccoon dogs or ferret badgers, either on a farm or in the wild. That scenario has occurred with several other emerging viruses, the team noted.
Less likely, they said, was that the virus jumped directly from a bat or other host animal to a human. The virus is genetically quite distinct even from the most closely related viruses found in bats to date, the team said. Only a few SARS-like viruses that have been isolated from bats in recent years have the ability to infect humans.
The report recommended more testing of possible animal sources, including pangolins, in China as well as Southeast Asia and other countries where bats that carry these viruses are found.
It cast doubt on a theory, supported by Chinese officials, that the virus was introduced to Wuhan via frozen food imported from abroad. “This would be extraordinary in 2019 where the virus was not widely circulating,” the report said.
But the report recommended further study into the idea—also backed by Chinese officials—that the virus had later spread via frozen food after it began circulating widely around the globe.
And it recommended no further research into the most politically sensitive hypothesis—promoted by the Trump administration and denied by Beijing—that the virus might have spilled from a Chinese laboratory.
The report stopped short of ruling out a lab accident altogether but said it would be “extremely unlikely” because there is no record that any laboratory, in China or elsewhere, had been working with either the new coronavirus or another, closely-related virus.
The team said it didn’t consider a hypothesis that the virus was deliberately engineered in a lab for release, because analyses of the genome have ruled that out, the report said.
In a statement, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “We will read the report and discuss its content and discuss next steps.” He added, “As I have said, all hypotheses are on the table and warrant complete and further studies.”
Most of the research for the report was conducted by Chinese scientists, almost all of whom work for the government. Under the terms of the study, that research was presented to the team of international scientists recruited by WHO during their visit in January and February.
The report, presented to member states as the final copy, was broadly consistent with the conclusions announced last month at the end of the Wuhan mission.
Still, there were areas where the team said it didn’t have enough data from China to draw firm conclusions.
Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University School of Medicine who has studied the virus’s origin, called the report “outstanding” in identifying future directions for research. “Anyone that wants to claim that the report is lacking in details will be disappointed,” he said.
Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, called it “really detailed and extensively documented.”
“This is a very difficult thing to reconstruct a year and a half later,” he said.