The hypothesis of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, in which the coronavirus could have escaped in autumn 2019, seemed to be off the table. A team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) had described it as "extremely unlikely" and recommended no further research. But now the Institute of Virology in Wuhan has come back into the focus of the debate. This has in part to do with the WHO annual meeting in Geneva. This week there will be advice on how to proceed in the search for the origin of the virus. The American government is pressing for the investigation into China to be continued and is demanding "a completely transparent process" from Beijing. China, on the other hand, regards the mission in its own country as completed and demands that the investigations should now concentrate on other countries.
Friederike Böge
Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.
Follow I follow
The thesis of the laboratory accident was last fed by the Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper reported a few days ago about a confidential paper by the Trump administration, according to which three researchers from the Wuhan Institute had visited a hospital in November 2019, before the diagnosis of the first known corona cases.
However, it is unclear which symptoms the scientists showed and whether they were hospitalized.
Since there are hardly any resident doctors in China, patients go to the clinic outpatient department even with slight complaints.
American President Joe Biden instructed its own secret services on Wednesday to intensify their research into the origin of the coronavirus and to submit a report within 90 days, which should also contain findings from American laboratories.
As things stand, a majority of the services do not consider the information available to be sufficient to assess whether a natural origin is more likely than the laboratory thesis, said Biden.
No evidence for an intermediate host
Regardless of the report by the Wall Street Journal, numerous renowned scientists have called for a forensic investigation by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in recent weeks. They are not based on fundamentally new findings, but rather point out that the WHO has not yet adequately examined the possibility of a laboratory accident. In addition, there is so far no evidence for the hypothesis of natural transmission by an intermediate host, which was assessed by the WHO experts as the most likely scenario.
"Only four of the 313 pages of the report (of the WHO Wuhan Mission) deal with the possibility of a laboratory accident," complained 18 biologists from universities in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Switzerland just two weeks ago in the journal Science. They are demanding disclosure of raw data from Chinese laboratories and health authorities and an "independently supervised" investigation. The fact that China has so far refused to share such data has raised doubts. In addition, write the biologists, conflicts of interest must be minimized. This presumably relates to the zoologist Peter Daszak, who was involved in the WHO mission in Wuhan, although as President of the EcoHealth Alliance he worked for years with the Wuhan Institute on research into new coronaviruses.Daszak vehemently rejected the laboratory hypothesis from the start.
The biosafety expert Ralph Baric, who has also cooperated with the Wuhan Institute and its director Shi Zhengli in the past, is one of the signatories of the appeal in the journal Science. The joint research focused on so-called gain-of-function experiments. Viruses are modified in the laboratory and their effect on human cells is examined. The aim of the experiments, which some scientists consider risky, is to identify dangers to humans at an early stage and to lay the foundations for the production of future vaccines.
Until the outbreak of the pandemic, this research by the Wuhan Institute was funded by the American government for years.
Baric told the Wall Street Journal that he still considers a natural cause of the pandemic to be the most likely scenario.
Nevertheless, he advocates a "thorough investigation" of the biosafety protocols of the Wuhan Institute.
In the meantime it has become known that part of the gain-of-function research took place in laboratories of security level 2, i.e. outside the high-security laboratory in Wuhan.
This has also led epidemiologist Ian Lipkin from Columbia University to reassess.
Nobody should investigate bat viruses at this lower security level, he said in an interview.
The calm of the White House enlivens the debate
Another prominent professional also seems to have reconsidered his position: US government adviser Anthony Fauci. He was not sure that the virus had spread to humans via an intermediate host, he said recently and advocated “further investigation into what happened in China”. In doing so, he incurred the anger of the Chinese party press. The Global Times newspaper accused Fauci on Wednesday of participating in a "war of opinion against China" and thereby giving up moral and scientific standards. A government spokesman spoke of "conspiracy theories and disinformation".
In fact, many American scientists had long placed the hypothesis of a laboratory accident in the context of conspiracy theories. Some science journalists are now wondering whether this was also because they wanted to distance themselves from the shrill Trump rhetoric, which has called the coronavirus kung-flu. The new calm in the White House seems to be fueling the scientific debate about whether and how the coronavirus could have escaped from a laboratory.