The Associated Press reviews the ins and outs of the investigation into the origin of the virus, pointing directly to Chinese President Xi Jinping‘s tight control of related research. The politicization of science threatens to cause the next outbreak to spiral out of control.
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Ai Weiwei’s documentary “Coronation” captures the first to last day of the Wuhan blockade and explores the political specter of state control in China.
(Deutsche Welle Chinese) According to an Associated Press investigation, more than a year since the first known New Coronavirus patient was infected, the Chinese government has tightly controlled all research on the origins of the New Coronavirus, aggressively promoting it outside while cracking down on some.
On the other hand, the Associated Press found that the Chinese government is awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to military scientists studying the origins of the virus in southern China. Internal documents obtained by the AP show that the Chinese government is monitoring the results of these scientists’ research and mandating that any publication of data or research must be approved by a working group directly ordered by President Xi Jinping.
This is a rare leak within the Chinese government, and the dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected: a high-level mandate to tightly control the investigation into the origin of the virus. As a result, very little information has been made public. Authorities have severely restricted information and hindered collaboration with international scientists.
Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at Duke University, oversees a laboratory in China that studies the spread of infectious diseases from animals to humans. He is curious about what these studies have found.
Maybe their data is not conclusive, or they’re suppressing it for some political reason,” he says. I don’t know. …… I wish I knew.”
The Associated Press conducted dozens of interviews with scientists and officials in China and abroad and referred to public documents, leaked emails, internal data and documents from within the Chinese government and the CDC, among others. These sources reveal a pattern of government secrecy and top-down control. This pattern was evident throughout the virus pandemic.
Politicization of the origin of the virus
As previously documented by the Associated Press, this culture has delayed warnings of the pandemic, hindered information sharing with the World health Organization, and prevented early testing. Scientists familiar with China’s public health system say the same approach has targeted sensitive research.
They only choose people they can trust, those they can control,” said one public health expert who works regularly with the CDC. The military team and other teams are working hard, but it all depends on the results whether they can be published.”
The expert declined to be named for fear of retaliation.
The virus pandemic has already tarnished Beijing’s reputation on the global stage, and Chinese leaders are wary of any findings that might suggest they were negligent in the spread of the outbreak.
China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and National Health Commission, which is managing research into the origin of the coronavirus, did not respond to Associated Press-related inquiries. However, China’s Foreign Ministry has said in writing that the new coronavirus has been found in many parts of the world and that scientists should conduct international scientific research and cooperation on a global scale.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press linked the new research restrictions to Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades. But some Chinese scientists say the results were not shared simply because nothing meaningful was found.
“We have been searching (for the origin of the virus), but we haven’t found it,” said Zhang Yongzhen, a leading Chinese virologist.
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Internal documents show that the Chinese government soon began requiring all new coronavirus research in China to be approved by top government officials. Critics say this policy has paralyzed research efforts.
Chinese leaders are far from alone in politicizing research into the origins of the virus, and in April, President Donald Trump shelved a U.S.-funded project. The research sought to find dangerous diseases carried by animals in China and Southeast Asia, but Trump has cut off ties between Chinese and U.S. scientists.
Trump has also complicated the search for the origin of the virus. He directly blamed an accident at a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan for triggering the pandemic. While some experts say this theory cannot be ruled out, there is no evidence yet to support it.
Studying the origins of the new coronavirus is crucial to preventing future pandemics. While an international team from the World Health Organization plans to visit China in early January to investigate the cause of the pandemic, its membership and agenda must be approved by China.
Some public health experts have warned that China is refusing to allow international scientists further access to the country, a move that has jeopardized the global collaboration that identified the source of the SARS outbreak nearly 20 years ago.
Jonna Mazet, founding executive director of the University of California, Davis, Health Research Institute, said the lack of cooperation between U.S. and Chinese scientists is “disappointing” and that the consequences of U.S. scientists not being able to work in China “are devastating.
There is so much speculation around the origin of this virus that we need to step back …… and let scientists get real answers, not accusations,” she said.
How Beijing tightened its grip on the outbreak’s origins investigation
The covert hunt for the origin of the new coronavirus shows how the Chinese government is trying to steer such claims.
The search began at the Wuhan South China Seafood Market, a sprawling, low-rise collection of buildings where the first human cases of the new coronavirus were found. Scientists initially suspected the virus came from wild animals sold at the market, such as civet cats, which have been linked to the spread of SARS.
In mid-December last year, Jiang Dafa, a South China trader, began noticing people getting sick. The first was a working man in his 60s who helped clean up animal carcasses at his stall, and soon after, a friend who played chess with him also fell ill. The third was a seafood vendor in his 40s who was also infected and later died.
Patients began pouring into nearby hospitals, and by late December an alert was triggered that alerted the CDC. CDC Director Gao Fu immediately sent an investigation.
At first, the research seemed to move quickly. But overnight on Jan. 1, Jiang Dafa said, the market was suddenly ordered closed and vendors were forbidden to take their wares. CDC researchers collected 585 environmental samples from door handles, sewage and the market’s floor, and authorities sprayed the complex down with disinfectant. Afterward, they would cart out everything inside and burn it.
Internal CDC data obtained by the Associated Press shows that by Jan. 10 and 11, researchers were sequencing dozens of environmental samples from Wuhan. Gary Kobinger, a Canadian microbiologist who advises WHO, emailed his colleagues to share his concerns that the virus originated in the market.
This coronavirus is very close to SARS,” he wrote on Jan. 13. If we don’t care about the accident …… then I would want to check out these bats in the market (for sale and wild).”
By late January, Chinese state media announced that 33 of the environmental samples had tested positive. In a report to the WHO, officials said 11 specimens were more than 99 percent similar to the new coronavirus. They also told the U.N. health agency that rats of all sizes are common in markets and that most of the positive samples were concentrated in an area where vendors buy and sell wild animals.
Meanwhile, Jiang Dafa avoided telling others he worked at the South China Seafood Market for fear of stigma. He also criticized the resulting political wrangling between the U.S. and China: “It makes no sense to blame anyone for this disease.”
As the virus continued to spread rapidly into February, Chinese scientists published a series of research papers on the new coronavirus. A subsequent paper by two Chinese scientists suggested, without concrete evidence, that the virus may have leaked from a Wuhan lab near the market. The paper was later pulled, and it is suspected that the authorities did so to control the rhetoric.
On Feb. 24, a notice from the CDC lab was put through a new publication approval process under “important instructions” from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Other notices ordered CDC staff not to share any data, specimens or other information related to the coronavirus with outside agencies or individuals.
Then on March 2, Xi Jinping emphasized “coordination” of research on the new coronavirus, according to state media. The next day, the Chinese Cabinet and State Council centralized all releases related to the new coronavirus into a task force. The notice, marked “not to be disclosed,” obtained by The Associated Press, is much broader than the previous CDC notice and applies to all universities, companies and medical research institutions.
The order said that under Xi’s instructions, communication and publication of research must be carefully planned like a “chess game” and that propaganda and public opinion teams should “guide publication. The order also warned that those who publish without authorization, “causing serious adverse social impact, will be held accountable.”
A former deputy director of the CDC said, “These rules are very strict and don’t make any sense. I think it’s political because people overseas may find that what is said there may contradict what is said in China, so it’s all controlled.”
He asked not to be named because they were told not to speak to the media.
After the secret order, the tide of research papers slowed to a trickle. Although Liu Jun, a researcher at the CDC, returned nearly 20 times in the months that followed, collecting about 2,000 samples, nothing of what those samples revealed was published.
In an interview with China’s Phoenix TV on May 25, CDC’s Gao Fu finally broke the silence surrounding the market. He said that unlike environmental samples, none of the animal samples from the market tested positive.
The news came as a surprise to scientists, who were not even aware that Chinese officials had taken samples from the animals. This rules out the market as a possible source of the virus, as well as further studies showing that many of the first cases were not linked to it.
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With the market proving to be a dead end in the search for its origin, scientists turned more attention to finding the virus on the possible source of the virus, bats.
Did the virus originally come from bats?
The Associated Press reports that deep in the lush valleys of China’s Yunnan Province is the entrance to a mine that houses a bat roost. These bats carry a virus most similar to the New Coronavirus.
The area has attracted intense interest from the scientific community because it may hold clues to the origin of the virus that has killed more than 1.7 million people worldwide. For scientists and journalists, however, it has become a black hole of no information because of political sensitivities and secrecy.
A visiting team of bat researchers recently managed to collect samples, but they were confiscated, two people familiar with the matter said. New coronavirus experts have been ordered not to speak to the media. And when a team of Associated Press reporters tried to visit in late November, plainclothes police followed in multiple cars and blocked roads and sites.
Nearly 1,000 miles from the Wuhan market, bats roost in a maze of underground limestone caves in Yunnan province. This region of southern China, bordering Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar, has fertile soil, soft soils, fog banks and lush plant growth, making it one of the most biodiverse areas on Earth.
Scientists are concerned about bat-human contact in caves like this one located in southern China’s Yunnan Province. In one Yunnan cave visited by the Associated Press, thick tree roots hung at the entrance, and bats flew out at dusk and over the roof of a small village nearby. The ground near an altar at the back of the cave was splattered with white feces, and Buddhist prayer ropes in red and yellow hung from stalactites. Villagers say the cave was once used as a holy place of practice by a Buddhist monk from Thailand.
Such contact between bats and people praying, hunting or mining in the cave has alarmed scientists. The genetic code of this new coronavirus is strikingly similar to that of the bat coronavirus, and most scientists suspect that the new coronavirus jumped into humans either directly from bats or through intermediate animals.
Since bats harboring the coronavirus are found in China and throughout Southeast Asia, the wildlife host of the new coronavirus could be anywhere in the region, said Prof. Ong Lim Huat of the Duke-NUS School of Medicine in Singapore.
He said, “There is a bat somewhere that has a virus that is 99.9 percent similar to the coronavirus.” He stressed that bats do not care about human national boundaries.
Research on the new coronavirus is ongoing in countries such as Thailand, where coronavirus expert Dr. Supaporn Wacharapluesadee is leading teams of scientists deep into the countryside to collect bat samples. During an August expedition, she told The Associated Press that “the virus can be found anywhere there are bats.
Chinese scientists quickly began testing potential animal hosts. Records show that infectious disease expert Xia Xueshan received a 1.4 million yuan ($214,000) grant to screen animals in Yunnan for the new coronavirus. State media reported in February that his team collected hundreds of samples from bats, snakes, bamboo rats and other animals, and published a photo of masked scientists wearing white lab coats around a large porcupine in a cage.
Then, though, the government restrictions kicked in. The data from the samples remained undisclosed, and Xia Xueshan did not respond to requests for interviews. An Associated Press review showed that while Xia has co-authored more than a dozen papers this year, only two were on the new coronavirus, and neither focused on its origins.
Today, the caves the scientists once surveyed are under close scrutiny by authorities. Security officers tailed the AP team at three sites across Yunnan and prevented journalists from visiting the cave where researchers identified the bat species responsible for SARS in 2017. At the entrance to a second site, a huge cave filled with tourists taking selfies, authorities shut the door on the AP.
A park official said, “We just got a call from the county.” An armed police officer then showed up to block it.
The RaTG13 virus was discovered in 2012 when six men cleaning a bat-filled mine mysteriously developed pneumonia, resulting in three deaths. Both the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese CDC have studied the bat coronavirus in this shaft. And although most scientists believe the new coronavirus originated in nature, others say it or a close relative may have been transported to Wuhan and mistakenly leaked.
Shi Zhengli, a bat expert at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has repeatedly denied that theory, but Chinese authorities have not yet allowed foreign scientists into the investigation.
Some state-backed scientists say research is proceeding as usual. Renowned virologist Zhang Yongzhen, who received a 1.5 million yuan ($230,000) grant to find the source of the virus, said collaborating scientists were sending him samples from around the country, including bats from Guizhou in southern China and rats from Henan, hundreds of miles away in the north.
He said : “Bats, rats, do they have new coronaviruses in them? Do they have this particular coronavirus? We’ve been doing this work for more than a decade. It’s not like we’re just starting today.”
Zhang declined to confirm or comment on reports that his lab was briefly shut down after it was ahead of authorities in releasing the genetic sequence of the virus. He said he had not heard of any particular restrictions on publishing papers, and that the only review his papers had undergone was a routine scientific review at his institution.
But scientists without state support complain that getting approval for animal samples in southern China is now very difficult, and that little is known about the findings of government-funded teams.
New crown source controversy resurfaces as documents from the early stages of the Hubei outbreak come to light
One year after the human encounter with New Guinea virus, and under China’s official information policy, not only are the current new cases in China largely caused by “imported food”, but discussions about the origin of the virus are increasingly pointing to foreign countries.
Beijing propagates that the virus is foreign
Not only is China controlling domestic research, but Chinese authorities are also promoting theories that the virus came from elsewhere.
Records show that the government gave 1.5 million yuan ($230,000) to Bi Yuhai, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was hired to spearhead the origin study. A paper co-authored by Bi Yuhai suggested that the June outbreak in the Beijing market may have been caused by contaminated packages of frozen fish from Europe.
The Chinese government-controlled media used this theory to suggest that the initial outbreak in Wuhan may have started with seafood imported from abroad. However, international scientists reject this view. The WHO says it is highly unlikely that people would have contracted the new coronavirus through packaged food, and that it is “highly speculative” that the virus did not start in China. Bi Yuhai did not respond to an interview request, and China has not provided enough samples of the virus for definitive analysis.
Chinese state media have also widely reported on preliminary studies from Europe suggesting that the new coronavirus was found in wastewater samples from Italy and Spain last year. But scientists have largely dismissed those studies, and by the researchers’ own admission, they have not found enough virus fragments to conclusively determine whether it is a coronavirus.
And in the past few weeks, Chinese state media have taken the research of a German scientist out of context and interpreted it to mean that the outbreak began in Italy. The scientist, Alexander Kekule, director of the Institute for Biosafety, has repeatedly said he believes the virus first appeared in China.
Internal documents show that several government agencies have also sponsored research on the possible role of the Chinese pangolin as an intermediate animal host. In a three-day period in February, Chinese scientists published four separate papers on a coronavirus associated with the new coronavirus in Malay pangolins trafficked from Southeast Asia that were seized by Guangdong customs officials.
But many experts now say the theory is unlikely. The search for coronaviruses in pangolins does not appear to be “scientifically driven,” said Professor Wang Linfa of the Duke-NUS School of Medicine in Singapore. He said blood samples would be the most conclusive evidence of the presence of the new coronavirus in the rare mammal, and so far no matches have been found in pangolins.
More than 500 other animals, including cats, ferrets and hamsters, are being studied as possible intermediate hosts for the new coronavirus, WHO said.
Missing Chinese patient zero
The Chinese government is also limiting and controlling the search for patient zero by retesting old flu samples.
Chinese hospitals are collecting thousands of samples each week from patients with flu-like symptoms and storing them in freezers. Lei Ye, founding director of the CDC office in China, said they could easily retest for the new coronavirus, though political factors might then determine whether the results are made public.
It would be crazy not to do that,” he said. …… The political leadership is waiting for that information to see, does it make China look stupid? … If it makes China look stupid, they won’t release it.”
In the United States, CDC officials have long tested about 11,000 early samples collected under the flu surveillance program since Jan. 1. And in Italy, researchers recently identified a boy who had been sick in November 2019 and later tested positive for the new coronavirus.
In China, however, scientists have published retrospective testing data from only two Wuhan flu surveillance hospitals – at least 18 in Hubei province alone, and more than 500 nationwide. These data include only 520 of the 330,000 samples collected in China last year.
These huge research gaps are not just due to a lack of testing, but also to a lack of transparency. Internal data obtained by the Associated Press show that by Feb. 6, the Hubei Provincial CDC had tested more than 100 samples in Huanggang, a city southeast of Wuhan. But the results have not been made public.
What little information has emerged suggests that the virus circulated widely outside Wuhan in 2019. The finding could raise awkward questions for Chinese officials about their early handling of the outbreak. Chinese researchers found that by Jan. 2, a child more than 100 kilometers from Wuhan had contracted the virus, suggesting it spread widely in December. But early samples were not tested, according to a scientist with direct knowledge of the study.
The scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said, “The time period of the study was chosen very carefully because it might have been too sensitive to go too early.”
A WHO report written in July but published in November said Chinese authorities identified 124 cases in December 2019, including five outside Wuhan. One of the purposes of the WHO’s upcoming visit to China is to review hospital records by December.
Peter Daszak, a WHO team member and coronavirus expert, said determining the source of the outbreak should not be used to incriminate.
We’re all part of this together,” he said. And until we realize that, we’re never going to get rid of this problem of wanting to find the culprit.”
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