Five months have passed
since the World Health Organization (WHO) appointed a new team made up of the best virus hunters in the world, those chosen to try to decipher the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
There were 27 renowned scientists who made up the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of New Pathogens
, shortened by its acronym SAGO.
Since the day of its presentation, no further report has come out about what the WHO researchers are doing.
María Van Kerkhove, technical leader of the international organization on Covid-19, presented
the SAGO team in October, days after the Chinese authorities announced that they were going to analyze the blood donations made during the year 2019 in Wuhan
, collected at the Center of blood of the city.
Experts from around the world, including those at the WHO, had called since the beginning of the pandemic for those samples to be tested.
A request that China put on hold for a year and a half.
There are about 200,000 blood samples from 2019
kept in Wuhan, marked by date and location.
They could contain crucial signs of the first antibodies that help determine how, when and where Covid first crossed into humans.
"Blood sample studies are absolutely critical to understanding the early days of the pandemic," Van Kerkhove said.
Chinese officials responded to the WHO that they would explore their blood banks, but would not give international researchers free, unsupervised access to the results.
Officially, nothing has been heard from those blood samples since
.
Not a comment from China's highest authority for disease control.
Nor any
paper
in any scientific journal.
Last Christmas, the team of Chinese experts that maintains direct contact with the WHO assured this newspaper that they had begun to carry out serological studies.
Regarding the results, they specified that "they will know each other when the time comes."
This week, after several emails, they finally replied that "there is no additional information to provide at this time."
There is also no news from the WHO team, which includes most of the experts who were already on the first mission in Wuhan
.
The international body remains silent on the queries about the evolution of the new investigation that supposedly began in October.
Two years have passed since the first known outbreak in Wuhan and China is now battling its worst wave of Covid-19 since the early days of the pandemic.
On the origin of the virus, there is no apparent progress.
The same theories and unknowns that appear in the report written by the first WHO team that was in Wuhan remain: it is committed to zoonotic origin
, bats are the main candidates to be the original hosts of SARS-CoV-2, but it is unknown what the intermediate host was before the coronavirus was transmitted to humans.
It is not even clear when it began to spread or from where.
constant obstacles
More than six million deaths later, there are still more questions than answers.
And politics crosses the path of science again.
The Chinese government has been putting stones in the way of an independent search in Wuhan throughout the pandemic
.
In private, WHO experts complain that it is precisely these obstacles to work that are slowing down the possibility of a deeper investigation.
The disparate theories that often come out in China about the origin of the pandemic also do not help in maintaining regular, serene and scientific contact with international experts.
Beijing's latest outpost has been to embrace one of the Russian disinformation campaigns in the war in Ukraine: the United States tested bat coronaviruses in Ukrainian laboratories to research biological weapons.
Chinese newspapers have bought this claim from Kremlin propaganda and repeat it on their pages daily.
From the Asian giant they have used these alleged findings from Moscow to divert the theory that the coronavirus had leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, while reviving past comments from Chinese politicians and doctors insinuating that it was the US army that manufactured the virus. virus and planted it in China.
In the aftermath of Ukraine earlier this week, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian recalled Fort Detrick, the Maryland lab that was at the center of the China conspiracy theory last year.
The Chinese state chain CCTV dedicated a documentary to him focused on the "dark history" of this place.
"Fort Detrick is the center of the bio-military activities of the United States. There are numerous scientific articles that show that already in 2003 this institute had the advanced capabilities to synthesize and modify coronaviruses," said a documentary that was broadcast the same week on The one in which President
Joe Biden gave US intelligence 90 days to submit a report that would reveal whether the coronavirus was transmitted to humans naturally or through a leak in the Wuhan laboratory
.
After three months, the papers that reached Biden said that the intelligence services had not reached any clear conclusion about the origin of the pandemic, despite attempts also by some Washington media to resurrect the theory of an accident in the Wuhan lab.
Leaving the political mud and returning to science, the latest published studies once again focused on the origin of Covid in what was initially indicated
as a possible ground zero for contagion
, the Huanan wet market, where it was speculated that the coronavirus had passed to the humans through some wild species that was sold there.
A team led by Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, presented two
preprints
in February concluding that "the geographic clustering of the earliest known cases of Covid-19 and the proximity of positive environmental samples to live animal vendors suggest that the wholesale seafood market was the site of origin of Covid-19".
The studies contain genetic analyzes of coronavirus samples collected from the market and from the first official infected in December 2019
, as well as geolocation analysis connecting the samples to the section of the market where wild animals were sold.
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