Starting in early January, a group of more than a dozen experts commissioned by WHO will arrive in China to investigate the origin of the coronavirus. According to information communicated to several major international news agencies by members of the group, they will enter China and will first be quarantined for two weeks, followed by a four-week investigation. The French weekly ” Opinion ” published a relevant article on the subject, saying that this is an investigation that is a year late . The article cites U.S. experts who question the purpose of the team’s trip to China and the way it was conducted, and points out that one member of the team, Dasak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, is alleged to have a conflict of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, and that having him as a member of the team is alarming ……
Purpose of WHO mission to China
To avoid creating a tense confrontation during the investigation, please do not politicize the investigation,” WHO Director-General Tan Desai said at a press conference in late November ……. He vowed: “WHO will make every effort, firmly based on science, to find the source of the virus.”
The Viewpoint article cites that according to Reuters, a team of WHO experts will travel to Wuhan, but previous revelations had indicated that Chinese authorities were putting up barriers to this, preferring remote access via video. The team sent three messages to the media on how to translate the conditions set by Beijing for the investigation into an on-the-ground investigation.
First, the purpose of the investigation is definitely not to “judge” China. One of the investigators, Fabian Leendertz of the Robert-Koch Institute, a German disease control agency, told the Associated Press, “The purpose of the trip is not to find the guilty state or government.” “Rather, it’s to figure out exactly what happened and then see if we can reduce that risk in the future based on that data. “
The second message: focus more on the investigation of the “animal” source of the virus than on laboratory accidents. Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety expert at WHO’s China office, recently said again, “There is no indication that it was human-caused.”
The third message is that the investigation will take time and will not yield any results in the long term. Fabian Leindertz therefore warned from the start that “he was happy to carry out this somewhat Indiana Jones-style operation with a field investigation and a decisive breakthrough, but in reality it was “a collaboration with Chinese colleagues to let them help determine the next necessary steps and to understand how to proceed. “
The quest to find the source of the pandemic through incidental transmission from bats to intermediate host animals and humans, through activities such as trade or breeding, will inevitably take years, the report notes. After the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, it took six years to pinpoint the source of the virus in pig farms in Mexico. For Sars-CoV-2, the virus that caused Covid-19, this will require increased surveillance of coronaviruses on farms and in wildlife, where there are numerous suspect animals that may be intermediate hosts, however, this is unlike surveillance networks for influenza viruses, which are still in their infancy.
However, the article points out that there is a second hypothesis in addition to this, which is that the source of the virus is related to laboratory accidents. Even if it is not a priority, perhaps a simple forensic investigation in a laboratory not far from the market where the virus was originally found should be possible as soon as possible, which might avoid years of research on another lead.
The participation of conflict-of-interest suspects on the investigation team is alarming!
“A reliable forensic investigation should require access to the files, samples, staff and buildings of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the CDC,” according to Richard Ebright, a biosafety expert and microbiologist at Rutgers University in the United States. “It should include examination of paper and electronic records, examination of refrigerators and freezers, interviews with personnel, including construction, maintenance, cleaning, waste reprocessing, laboratory and administrative department employees, and serological samples from those individuals and environmental samples from the buildings. “But apparently all of this was not on the WHO investigation agenda.
But Ebright also fears that even if he could go to the laboratory, it would be absolutely official and formal, and the inquiries would be “extremely limited”. The scientist, who has questioned the origin of the virus since the spring, was particularly alarmed that Peter Daszak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, was on the list of investigative missions to China. He is a longtime collaborator of the Virology and Disease Research Group at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Ebright explained, “Daszak has a conflict of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology that is not qualified to investigate.” Dasak has a contract with the WVI and has received $200 million from USAID and also $7 million from the NIH. And is a collaborator on the VuVu research project that should have been investigated. He should have been investigated himself! “But, he noted, “The Lancet appointed him to head the Task Force on the origins of Covid-19, and the World health Organization included him in the investigation team … This fact suggests that the work would not be considered a credible investigation, but rather a crude attempt at whitewashing. “
For Richard Ebright, the effort to bury the lab trail began on March 17 with the publication that day in Nature Medicine, a supplement to the Nature group of scientific journals, of an article on ” The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2,” which was then considered authoritative evidence that the virus may not have originated from the activities of the Wuhan laboratory. However, this article, as well as a letter in The Lancet on February 17, were not actually peer-reviewed scientific articles based on new scientific data, but rather a “forum” of “opinion only”.
The information exchanged by the co-signers of these texts was recently leaked and released by the U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), an investigative research group dedicated to improving transparency in public health. The email correspondence obtained by USRTK suggests that the letter in The Lancet was orchestrated by the EcoHealth Alliance and Dasak. However, the letter was also drafted in such a way as to avoid being identified as coming from any organization or individual, and should be seen as “simply a letter from a leading scientist. In addition to Daschak, four other signatories are affiliated with the EcoHealth Alliance, but they have not disclosed this information, and all of them claim to have no conflict of interest.
The White House cut off funding for the research institute in May after it was revealed that the Daschak-led institute had long collaborated with the WVI and received U.S. funding, but Daschak denied funding the Wuhan Institute of Virus this year but admitted to having previously used U.S. government research funds to conduct collaborative research with scientists at the institute. He told NPR that the halt in funding had caused significant losses to the research program, and that the EcoHealth Alliance had been unable to obtain samples of the large number of coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virus as a result.
According to WHO, the selection criteria for the group of investigative experts “are the same criteria we routinely use to select expert groups and overseas teams, balancing the highest level of expertise with a broad geographic and diversity representation of the international community. Dasak is listed on the panel as a zoologist and president of the U.S. Ecological Health Alliance.
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