In its first report, a team of international scientists assembled by the World Health Organization to advise on the origins of the coronaviruses said on Thursday that bats carried an ancestors of the coronaviruses that may have then spilled over into a mammal sold at a wildlife market. There is a possibility that a lab leak played a part in the spread of the virus, according to the team.
The team, appointed by the W.H.O. in October as the organization tried to reset its approach to studying the Pandemic's origins, said that Chinese scientists had shared information with them. The report said that it was difficult to determine when and where the outbreak began.
The team of scientists from the United States, China and other countries could not help the W.H.O. because of political barriers in China.
Lawrence Gostin is the director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. He said that the report gave a road map for investigating future Pandemics.
The W.H.O. asked the group to look at the emergence of future pathogens and study the origins of the coronaviruses. The Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens does not have the authority to conduct inquiries in China or anywhere else.
The W.H.O.'s Covid-19 technical lead said the report was just the beginning of their work.
A previous team sent to China by the W.H.O. was expected to show more openness to a lab leak than the current group. The report with China said that a lab leak was not likely. The director general of the W.H.O. called it premature.
There was no new data pointing to a lab leak. The group's leaders want to evaluate any evidence that comes in the future.
Marietjie Venter, the team's chairwoman and a professor of medical virology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said there had been no reports of a lab leak.
The report said that efforts to study a lab leak met resistance from team members from China, Russia and Brazil.
Since the previous W.H.O. team's work, a number of studies into the role of animals in the emergence of the coronaviruses have been published. According to a survey of a live animal market in China, there were several species that were susceptible to the coronaviruses in the fall of 2019.
The police shut down the market after people became sick and made it difficult for scientists to identify potential hosts for the virus.
The report said that it was focusing on published, peer-reviewed studies, but acknowledged a number of pre-prints. In two papers released this year, a team of scientists argued that the outbreak of the Pandemic was caused by a batinfecting a wild animal and then selling it at a seafood market.
It was unfortunate that the W.H.O. team didn't look closely at the unpublished research, according to an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona.
If you read our pre-prints, you will see that there is strong evidence that the epidemic emerged through wildlife.
In January 2020, researchers lost a chance to find the coronaviruses on wildlife farms that supplied markets like Huanan. Millions of animals were culled instead.
Filippa Lentzos is a researcher at King's College London. She said that the proposals for future studies didn't account for investigations into accidents or deliberate events.
The report made clear that it was necessary to consider both animal and laboratory origins in order to mitigate future Pandemic threats.
He said that both of these things need to be considered together.
Blood samples from workers at wildlife farms and live animal markets should be studied. The previous W.H.O. team had tried to do some similar studies.
According to the report, Dr. Tedros wrote Chinese officials twice in February requesting information on the status of the studies and a potential lab leak. There was no indication that the W.H.O. would be able to get China to share the results.
There is some information from China.
A small study on bats and dogs was published in China last week. The researchers found a new species of coronaviruses in 15 animals. Some of the coronaviruses that were found in the bats were related to the one that caused Covid, and others were related to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003
Maciej Boni is a researcher at Penn State University. Sampling on the scale of tens of thousands of bats is what we need.
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