One-and-a-half years after the COVID-19 pandemic struck and ravaged the world, the World Health organization (WHO) on July 15 was seen for the first time taking a tougher stand against China, demanding transparency, sharing of raw data on the first days of spread of COVID-19 in China, and conducting of international audits of its laboratories and markets in the city of Wuhan so as to better help the world in understanding the origins of the novel coronavirus which has so far claimed more than 40 lakh lives the world over.
"We ask China to be transparent and open and to cooperate. We owe it to the millions who suffered and the millions who died, to know what happened," WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reportedly said at a news conference at its headquarters in Geneva. This is a sharp turn for the WHO which had so far remained strangely ineffective and tight-lipped when it came to demanding answers from China on what actually happened in Wuhan in the months preceding the pandemic.
"China is at the centre of this international catastrophe because it totally delayed sharing information about the outbreak in the first few weeks of the epidemic, punished doctors who spoke and journalists who told the truth. It also did in full cognizance and awareness of the World Health Organization, who chose to look the other side and in effect both exposed the rest of the world to the virus and at the same time downplayed its dangers," says Dr Moushumi Basu, a professor at the School of International Studies in New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Now, with the organization pulling up its socks under pressure from an aggressive community of researchers and scientists in the media and the internet coupled with additional pressure from the US, its biggest funding state and with Biden Administration launching its own inquiry into the virus origins, the discourse on a possible lab leak has become louder and sharper than ever. Yet, on July 22, when the WHO proposed a plan for the second phase of an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus, which includes the hypothesis that it could have escaped from a Chinese laboratory, China unequivocally rejected it, with its vice minister of National Health commission, Zeng Yixin reportedly saying, "We will not accept such an origins-tracing plan as it, in some aspects, disregards common sense and defies science."
This was the second such investigation the WHO planned, after the "miserable" failure of its first investigation this year when its team went to China on their Wuhan field visit from January 14 t0 February 10, 2021, and was not able to provide substantial answers to the virus origins. “As far as WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table. This report is a very important beginning, but it is not the end. We have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do. Finding the origin of a virus takes time. No single research trip can provide all the answers,” Tedros had said. In fact, he admitted that one cannot completely dismiss the plausibility that a lab error or leak may have occurred which must have led to the escape of the bat coronavirus. "I have been a lab technician myself and I know that this is possible," he said.
Accordingly, it announced its plans for a second visit but this time, things are different: So far, the WHO had been denying the plausibility of a lab leak narrative and strongly maintained the "zoonotic theory which was in line with China's narrative that COVID-19 pathogen arose in an animal and got transmitted to humans via an unknown intermediate host. But with the lab leak theory getting louder the world over, Tedros, who had so far been accused of being too deferential to Chinese President Xi Jinping, asked China to "cooperate". The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is world famous for its study of bat coronaviruses, and an outpost of the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention also has a lab in the city that does similar work.
"While China's utter disregard for WHO's repeated entreaties for cooperating with its investigations is not very surprising, the WHO is equally responsible for letting China on. It gave the Asian country all the time it needed, turned a blind eye to its misdoings and pushed all evidence under the carpet. Now, if China refuses to cooperate, the United Nations Security Council needs to take a stern step against it and sanctions must be imposed," says Dr Gobardhan Das, professor of molecular medicine from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Scientist Monali Rahalkar who, along with a group of 32 scientists, has penned the "fourth open letter"—a call for a comprehensive investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2—proposes a "two-step process that encourages China to participate in a full, scientific and data-driven investigation. In the event that the Chinese government chooses not to participate, a thorough investigation into the virus origins is still possible by the group of nations of the world and has a high likelihood of success and should be pursued for common good, she says. In an interview to THE WEEK, Rahalkar says, "while this type of alternate investigation, by unfortunate necessity, carried out without the full participation of the Chinese government, would suffer from a lack of access to many important records, samples, and personnel inside China, a great deal of highly relevant information could still be gathered without the participation of Chinese authorities. In fact, many governmental and individual investigators around the world have already gathered and begun analysing significant amounts of relevant data. A well organized and concerted effort, free of interference and drawing on all available information sources and involving a large pool of experts, could well end-up providing unambiguous evidence supporting one particular origin hypothesis or another."
As per the fourth letter, an investigation carried out without the assistance of Chinese authorities should include a careful testing and analysis of hospital samples and environmental samples from various countries to better understand the initial emergence and the early spread of SARS-CoV-2 around the world; a thorough evaluation of the farm-animal and wild-life trades from South-East Asia to China, and within China, and their potential roles in the pandemic; a detailed analysis of all the known coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 to reconstruct the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 (its geography and its phylogenetic relationships); a systematic search for documents and missing information about key virus sequences, including: The main WIV database of pathogens, samples and isolates that was taken offline in September 2019 and never reinstated, and the other databases managed by the WIV which were taken offline, among others.
