Origin of SARS-CoV-2

Investigations into the origin of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) include several ongoing missions and efforts by governments, international organisations, and others.

Origins

COVID-19 is caused by infection with a virus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). SARS-CoV-2 appears to have originated in bats or pangolins and was spread to humans by zoonotic transfer, although the likelihood that pangolins facilitated viral adaptation to human is low. Its exact evolutionary history, the identity and provenance of its most recent ancestors, and the place, time, and mechanism of transmission of the first human infection, remain unknown.

Health authorities in China and abroad have cautioned that origin tracing efforts could take years and the results could be inconclusive.

International calls for investigations

In April 2020, Australian foreign minister Marise Payne called for an independent international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. A few days later, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison insisted that Australia should remain committed to an independent investigation into the origin of COVID-19 in spite of China's dismissal of the prospect. German chancellor Angela Merkel also pressed China for transparency about the origin of the coronavirus, following similar concerns raised by the French president Emmanuel Macron. Britain also expressed support for an investigation, although both France and Britain said the priority at the time was to first fight the virus.

In May 2020, the World Health Assembly, which governs the World Health Organization (WHO), passed a motion calling for a "comprehensive, independent and impartial" investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic. A record 137 countries, including Australia and China, co-sponsored the motion, giving overwhelming international endorsement to the investigation.

In November 2020, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said "We need to know the origin of this virus because it can help us to prevent future outbreaks," adding, "There is nothing to hide. We want to know the origin, and that's it." He also urged countries not to politicize the origin tracing process, saying that would only create barriers to learning the truth.

Chinese government investigations

The first investigation conducted in China was by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, responding to hospitals reporting cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology, resulting in the closure of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market on 1 January 2020 for environmental sanitation and disinfection. Chinese national authorities informed the WHO China Country Office of these cases on 31 December 2019.

In April 2020, China imposed restrictions on publishing academic research on the novel coronavirus. Investigations into the origin of the virus would receive extra scrutiny and must be approved by Central Government officials. Despite the restrictions, Ian Lipkin, a U.S. scientist, said that he was working with a team of Chinese researchers under the auspices of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a Chinese government agency, to investigate the origin of the virus. Lipkin has developed long-standing relationships with Chinese officials, including premier Li Keqiang, because of his contributions to rapid testing for SARS in 2003.

In December 2020, it was reported that the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper featured a study by scientists associated with the state-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences positing that the earliest human-to-human transmission occurred on the Indian subcontinent three to four months before the Wuhan outbreak. The study, which was not peer-reviewed, was posted on the preprint platform SSRN. It was later withdrawn from the platform at the authors' request.

U.S. government investigations

According to The New York Times, in mid-January 2020, U.S. intelligence agencies had not detected any alarm within the Chinese government that analysts presumed would be associated with an accidental virus leak from a government lab. The New York Times later reported that in January, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could not support any hypothesis of the outbreak's origin, with CIA analysts saying there was no evidence at the time to get behind any with high confidence. In April 2020, the New York Times reported that senior officials in the Trump administration were pressuring intelligence agencies to find evidence for the unsubstantiated theory that the virus leaked from the laboratory, leading to concern among some intelligence analysts that intelligence assessments would be distorted to serve a political campaign to lay blame on China for the outbreak.

On 6 February 2020, the director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy requested the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a meeting of "experts, world class geneticists, coronavirus experts, and evolutionary biologists", to "assess what data, information and samples are needed to address the unknowns, in order to understand the evolutionary origins of COVID-19 and more effectively respond to both the outbreak and any resulting information".

In April 2020, it was reported that the U.S. intelligence community was investigating whether the virus came from an accidental leak from a Chinese lab. The hypothesis was one of several possibilities being pursued by the investigators. While U.S. officials said it is a known fact that scientists at a lab in Wuhan have conducted ongoing research on coronaviruses, then U.S. secretary of defense Mark Esper said the results of the investigation were "inconclusive". By the end of April 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the U.S. intelligence community believed the coronavirus was not man-made or genetically modified, adding "The intelligence community will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan." According to a foreign official in regular contact with the Trump administration, the intelligence shared by the U.S. with the Five Eyes did not rule one hypothesis in or out. The official highlighted the lack of an independent team inside China.

On 3 May 2020, US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo said in a TV interview that there is "enormous evidence" the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan without providing any of the alleged evidence. However, on the same day, Pompeo told a radio interviewer, "We don't know if it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We don't know if it emanated from the wet market or yet some other place. We don't know those answers." On 5 May 2020, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley said the weight of evidence at the time suggested that the coronavirus was neither man-made nor released from a lab, although "nothing's conclusive". The same month, German foreign intelligence briefed the German government that the Trump administration's claims about a lab leak were possibly deliberate misinformation, and were meant to distract from the administration's handling of the pandemic in the U.S. German intelligence found that none of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies were willing to support Pompeo's claims of a lab leak.

On 4 January 2021, The Times reported that Matthew Pottinger, then Deputy National Security Advisor, said that a whistleblower former scientist from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been working with U.S. intelligence services, revealing that the laboratory was linked to the Chinese military, which may have been using its research for dual use. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Pottinger had believed that Chinese leaders were engaging in a massive coverup and "psychological warfare" to obscure the origin of the virus and deflect blame. He pushed intelligence agencies to explore the hypothesis that the virus was accidentally leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan.

On 15 January 2021, the U.S. State Department published a "fact sheet", stating that the U.S. government was not sure if the outbreak of the virus began "through contact with infected animals", or as a result of "an accident at a laboratory" in Wuhan. The document stated "The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses." It further stated that the institute has "engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017". Chinese government spokesperson Hua Chunying countered the claims.

World Health Organization investigations

In mid 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) began negotiations with the government of China on conducting an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. On 5 November 2020, the WHO published a "terms of reference" document for a "WHO-convened Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2" based on terms agreed in their negotiations with the government of China. The terms of reference outline a first phase of study to better understand how the virus "might have started circulating in Wuhan", and a second phase of longer-term studies based on its findings.

The WHO formed a team of ten researchers with expertise in virology, public health and animals to conduct investigations. The mission was expected to travel to China in the first week of January 2021 to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Chinese government blocked the entry of the WHO team after their visas were not approved, despite the fact that China had previously agreed to allow the team's entry. A few days later, permission was granted for the team to arrive. On 14 January 2021, the WHO's investigation team arrived in Wuhan, China.

Members of the investigative team include Thea Fisher, John Watson, Marion Koopmans, Dominic Dwyer, Vladimir Dedkov, Hung Nguyen-Viet, Fabian Leendertz, Peter Daszak, Farag El Moubasher, and Ken Maeda. The team also includes five WHO experts led by Peter Ben Embarek, two Food and Agriculture Organization representatives, and two representatives from the World Organisation for Animal Health. The inclusion of Peter Daszak in the team has stirred controversy. Daszak is the head of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies spillover events, and has been a longtime collaborator of over 15 years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology's Shi Zhengli. While Daszak is highly knowledgeable about Chinese laboratories and the emergence of diseases in the area, his close connection with the WIV is seen as a conflict of interest in the WHO's investigation. When a BBC News journalist asked about his relationship with the WIV, Daszak said, "We file our papers, it's all there for everyone to see."

U.S. officials previously denounced the investigation as a "Potemkin exercise" and criticised the "terms of reference" allowing Chinese scientists to do the first phase of preliminary research. On 15 January, U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo said that to assist the WHO investigative team's work and ensure a transparent, thorough investigation of COVID-19's origin, the U.S. was sharing new information and urging the WHO to press the Chinese government to address three specific issues, including the illnesses of several researchers inside the WIV in autumn 2019, the WIV's research on "RaTG13" and "gain of function", and the WIV's links to the Chinese military. On 18 January, the U.S. called on China to allow the WHO's expert team to interview "care givers, former patients and lab workers" in the city of Wuhan, drawing a rebuke from the Chinese government. Australia also called for the WHO team to have access to "relevant data, information and key locations".

The Lancet COVID-19 Commission task force

On November 23, 2020, an international task force led by Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, was formed as part of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, chaired by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Daszak stated that the task force was formed to "conduct a thorough and rigorous investigation into the origins and early spread of SARS-CoV-2". The task force has 12 members with backgrounds in One Health, outbreak investigation, virology, lab biosecurity and disease ecology.

See also

• COVID-19
• Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
• World Health Organization's response to the COVID-19 pandemic