Chinese authorities came under fire from the WHO on Friday for hiding research that might prove that Covid originated from wild animals. The WHO questioned why the information hadn’t been made public three years ago and why it is now missing.
An worldwide group of virus specialists downloaded and started analysing the study before the Chinese data vanished after it was published online in January.
Scientists claim it supports the hypothesis that the pandemic might have started when people at a seafood market in Wuhan were exposed to illegally trafficked raccoon dogs. Yet as soon as the scientists proposed working with their Chinese colleagues on the investigation, the gene sequences were taken out of a database used in science.
The director general of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that this statistics “could have and should have” been released three years earlier. The world community “has to be informed promptly” about the missing evidence, he added.
The study, which is now being reviewed by specialists, provides proof that raccoon dogs, fox-like creatures known to transmit coronaviruses, had DNA in the same Wuhan market location where genetic traces of the novel coronavirus were also found.
According to some specialists, this discovery raises the possibility that the animals were sick and may have exposed people to the virus.
Huge quantities of genetic data were extracted from animal cages, carts, and other surfaces at the Wuhan market in the early 2020s, and virus specialists had been anxiously awaiting its release ever since they learnt about it in a publication by Chinese scientists a year before.
This week, a French researcher found the genetic sequences in the database, and she and a group of colleagues started looking through them for hints about the pandemic’s beginnings.
The research team has not yet published a paper summarising the results. But last week, at a conference that also included a presentation by Chinese experts discussing the same data, the researchers provided their analysis of the material to a WHO advisory panel researching the origins of Covid.
According to Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the recent research, the analysis appeared to be at odds with earlier claims made by Chinese scientists that samples taken in the market that were positive for the coronavirus had been brought in by sick people alone.
Dr. Cobey said that if the contamination is mostly human, “it’s just highly improbable to be finding this much animal DNA, particularly raccoon dog DNA,” in the viral samples.
There are still unanswered questions regarding how the samples were obtained, what exactly was in them, and why the evidence vanished. Several experts expressed caution in response to the ambiguity, noting that it was hard to evaluate the findings without having access to the whole paper.
Recent weeks have seen a resurgence in interest in the theory that a lab mishap may have unintentionally sparked the epidemic, in part because of a new intelligence assessment from the department of energy and hearings conducted by the new Republican House leadership. Nevertheless, a number of virus specialists who were not engaged in the most recent investigation said that the information available about the swabs collected in the market supported the theory that animals sold there had caused the pandemic.
That is precisely what one would anticipate if the virus were to emerge from one or more intermediary hosts already in the market, according to Dr. Cobey. “I believe that environmentally, this case is almost over.”