IN MARCH, President Joe Biden asked his spooks how the co-19 pandemic had started. Contradicting claims made last year by Donald Trump, who said the intelligence services had shown him very strong eence on the matter, they told him that they did not know. So on May 26th he asked them again, publicly this time, admonishing them to try harder and to report back in 90 days.
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This is a direct rebuke to China’s secretive government. When experts convened by the World Health Organisation (WHO) travelled to Wuhan, the city where co-19 was first identified, in January and February this year their hosts refused to share crucial data. A senior Biden administration official said recently that he found those efforts to “undermine serious investigations” into the pandemic’s beginnings particularly troubling, and that they left “many more questions than answers”.
At the crux of this distrust is the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes co-19, may have emerged accidentally from research on animal coronaviruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or another nearby lab. In early 2020 this idea, sometimes conflated with the idea that the virus had been developed as a biological weapon, was publicly dismissed by eminent scientists. In February 2020 a number of them used the pages of the Lancet, a medical journal, “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that co-19 does not have a natural origin”. Most in the media followed their line. By far the most plausible account of co-19’s origins, they reported, was “zoonotic spillover”—that is, a virus jumping unaided from animals to humans, as is taken to have been the case for SARS, a disease caused by a different coronavirus, in 2002. Lab-leak theories were widely dismissed as conspiracy-mongering.
In the past few months, though, discussion of lab-leakery has gained currency among politicians and policy elites and in the mainstream media, as well as in influential blog posts by science reporters. This is in part because of the departures of Mr Trump and Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, who promoted the theory with gusto. To be able to consider the possibility without giving them succour will have made it easier for some.
But the resurgence is not a purely political phenomenon. On May 13th Science, a journal, published a letter from a group of senior scientists who had not previously weighed in on the matter arguing that “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable”. In this they were taking the same position as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s boss, who refused to rule out the possibility of a laboratory origin after the WHO mission in January and February was stonewalled, and has since called for further inquiry.
This is not going down well in China. On May 21st, at a Global Health Summit convened by the EU and G20, Xi Jinping, China’s president, urged world leaders to “firmly reject any attempt to politicise” the co-19 pandemic. On May 25th China’s representative at the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body, said the country considered the inquiry into the origins complete and that the focus should shift to other countries, strongly suggesting that it would not accommodate further investigation.
High on the assembly’s agenda were responses to the current pandemic and the prevention of future ones. Felicity Harvey, chair of an oversight committee for the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said that new virus threats must in future be handled with more transparency, better data-sharing and an ability to give informal early warnings to the world. Earlier in May a WHO panel of experts recommended that countries be placed under a greater obligation to report new outbreaks and that the WHO’s authority to seek out and share relevant information with the world be strengthened.
It would be surprising if China (and, indeed, some other countries) were to accept all these ideas. Its leadership has consistently fought to deny international bodies the right to stick their noses into the affairs of sovereign countries, and it does not always welcome the WHO’s attentions. In 2018 it declined requests from American officials, made under WHO guidelines, for lab samples of the H7N9 strain of avian flu.
China has instead recently indicated it will reform its own public-health system. On May 13th the authorities announced a reorganisation of the national public-health bureaucracy under a new entity, the National Administration of Disease Prevention and Control. A priority in the shake-up is to improve top-down control, so that lower-level officials have more incentive to report new public-health threats up the chain of command.
Chinese authorities tried to deal with a similar issue after the SARS outbreak of the 2000s, in part to tackle the problem that national health officials were outranked by provincial authorities who had covered up the early spread of that coronavirus in southern China. They made the monitoring of new threats more systematic, raised their game with the WHO and even co-operated with America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the model for China’s own CDC—the Wuhan office of which is now being mentioned in the context of a possible laboratory origin.
There is as yet no eence in the public domain that a laboratory leak actually took place; just eence that the possibility is real. Mr Biden’s request suggests anything the secret world can currently add to that is pretty weak stuff. His statement says that, at present, two “elements” within the intelligence community lean towards the zoonotic explanation, one prefers the laboratory origin, and no one has high confidence in any of these assessments. Without help from China, a harder look will not necessarily change this. But it is still worth taking, even given the risk of a confrontational response which will make the enhanced transparency and co-operation talked about at the World Health Assembly unlikely to blossom any time soon. ■
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