WHO team in Wuhan dismisses lab leak theory, continues hunt for intermediary coronavirus host
By Gerry Shih,
Ng Han Guan AP
TAIPEI, Taiwan — After a 12-day visit, a team on a World Health Organization mission to Wuhan appeared no closer to solving the mystery of how the novel coronavirus first spread to humans and sparked a pandemic.
Speaking at a news conference for the first time on Tuesday, leaders of the combined mission representing Chinese and international researchers said they found that the virus, officially called SARS-Cov-2, was spreading in the city of Wuhan in central China during December 2019 in parallel both inside and outside the Huanan Seafood Market, which they said indicates that the market was not the original source of the outbreak.
But they dismissed as “unlikely” another location mooted as the source of the virus: laboratories at the local Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish WHO food safety expert leading the international team, said his group will not recommend further investigation into the theory that the virus accidentally leaked from labs conducting coronavirus research.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/world/fact-checker/did-coronavirus-accidentally-escape-from-a-wuhan-lab-its-doubtful–the-fact-checker/2020/04/30/16d4cc97-d959-4091-b274-5db889e467a5_video.html
Embarek told reporters that the judgment was based on “long, frank, open discussions with researchers and management” at institutions including the WIV. The institute provided “detailed descriptions of the center’s research both present and past on all projects involving bats and coronaviruses and more advanced projects,” Embarek said. He added that he questioned WIV officials extensively about what they thought of the lab leak hypothesis.
“They’re the best ones to dismiss the claims and provide answers to all the questions,” the WHO team leader said.
The question of how the virus probably jumped from bats to infect humans has been a mystery since the start of the outbreak. Most researchers believe the virus passed through an intermediary host, such as pangolins, and evolved into a form that is easily transmissible among people.
A smaller circle of experts says the possibility cannot be ruled out that the virus slipped out of labs such as the WIV, a top institution that maintains and conducts work on a large library of coronaviruses sampled from bats found in southwestern China, including the two closest known relatives to SARS-Cov-2.
The head of the Chinese delegation, Liang Wannian, told reporters that none of the labs in Wuhan had worked with SARS-Cov-2 — only on the virus’s distant relatives. Instead, Liang pointed to the possibility that the virus jumped across species in nature through intermediary hosts such as pangolins, cats or minks. Embarek agreed that it was “most likely” the virus evolved in nature and spread to humans through an intermediary host.
Peter Daszak, a British member of the WHO mission in Wuhan who has collaborated with the WIV through his EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit, said on Twitter that the decision to downplay the lab theory was a unanimous judgment among the WHO team’s 17 members.
Liang and Embarek also said the virus may have been transmitted through cold chain food packaging, a theory that the Chinese government and its state media have increasingly elevated in recent months as part of an argument that covid-19 may not have originated in China.
On Tuesday, Liang and an official from China’s National Health Commission declared the China leg of the WHO probe complete and called for its scope to be expanded globally to answer the origin question.
Other parts of the world, such as Italy, have reported the discovery of covid-19 cases weeks or months before they were first reported in Wuhan in December 2019, the officials said. Liang said the WHO team combed through records and samples from Wuhan hospitals and found no evidence that covid-19 was spreading quietly in the city before December.
There are “indications of missed circulation in other regions and gaps of reporting,” Liang said as he called for a global review.
In recent days, Chinese state media have preempted Tuesday’s news conference with reports declaring Wuhan has been “cleared of guilt” as the suspected origin of the pandemic, with some echoing the Chinese Foreign Ministry in calling for an investigation into U.S. labs.
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