The World Health Organisation rebuked Chinese officials last week for withholding research that might link Covid’s origin to wild animals, asking why the data had not been made available three years ago and why the information had disappeared.
Before the Chinese data vanished, an international team of virus experts had downloaded and begun analysing the research, which appeared online in January.
They said the information supports the idea that the pandemic could have begun when illegally traded raccoon dogs infected humans at a Wuhan seafood market.
But the gene sequences were removed from a scientific database once the experts offered to collaborate on the analysis with their Chinese counterparts, reports The New York Times.
“These data could have – and should have – been shared three years ago,” said WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The missing evidence now “needs to be shared with the international community immediately”.
The experts reviewing it is said the research offers evidence that raccoon dogs, fox-like animals known to spread coronaviruses, had left behind DNA in the same place in the Wuhan market where genetic signatures of the new coronavirus were discovered.
They say this finding suggests the animals may have been infected and transmitted the virus to humans.
With huge amounts of genetic information drawn from swabs of animal cages, carts and other surfaces at the Wuhan market in early 2020, the information has been the focus of restless anticipation among virus experts since they learned of it a year ago in a paper by Chinese scientists.
A French biologist discovered the genetic sequences in the database last week, and she and a team of colleagues began mining them for clues about the origins of the pandemic.
That team has not yet released a paper outlining the findings. But the researchers delivered an analysis of the material to a WHO advisory group studying Covid’s origins in a meeting last week that also included a presentation by Chinese researchers regarding the same data.
The analysis seemed to clash with earlier contentions by Chinese scientists that samples from the market that were positive for the coronavirus had been ferried in by sick people alone, said Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the recent research.
“It’s just very unlikely to be seeing this much animal DNA, especially raccoon dog DNA, mixed in with viral samples, if it’s simply mostly human contamination,” she said.
Questions remain about how the samples were collected, what precisely they contained and why the evidence had disappeared.
That a lab accident might have accidentally set off the pandemic has become the focus of renewed interest in recent weeks, thanks partly to a fresh assessment from the Department of Energy and hearings held by the new Republican House leadership.
But numerous virus experts not involved with the latest analysis said that what was known about the swabs gathered in the market buttressed the case that animals sold there had sparked the pandemic.
“It’s exactly what you’d expect if the virus were emerging from an intermediate or multiple intermediate hosts in the market,” Cobey said. “I think ecologically, this is close to a closed case.”
Cobey was one of 18 scientists who signed a letter in the journal Science in May 2021 urging serious consideration of a scenario in which the virus could have spilled out of a laboratory in Wuhan.
On Friday, she said lab leaks continued to pose enormous risks and that more oversight of research into dangerous pathogens was needed. She added that an accumulation of evidence, relating to the clustering of human cases around the Wuhan market, the genetic diversity of viruses there, and now the raccoon dog data, strengthened the case for a market origin.
The new genetic data do not appear to prove a raccoon dog was infected with the coronavirus. Even if it had been, the possibility would remain that another animal could have passed that virus to people, or even that someone infected with the virus could have transmitted it to a raccoon dog.
Some scientists reiterated those points on Friday, saying the new genetic data did not appreciably shift the discussion about the pandemic’s origins.
Chinese scientists had released a study in February 2022 looking at the market samples. There was, however, speculation that they might have posted the data in January because they were required to make them available as part of a review of their study by a scientific journal.
The Chinese study had suggested that samples testing positive for the virus had come from infected people, rather than from animals sold in the market. That fit with a narrative long promulgated by Chinese officials: that the virus sprang not only from outside the market, but also from outside the country altogether.
But the Chinese report had left clues that viral material at the market had been jumbled together with genetic material from animals.
And scientists said that the new analysis by the international team illustrated an even stronger link with animals.
“Scientifically, it doesn’t prove raccoon dogs were the source, but it smells as if infected raccoon dogs were at the market,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport. “It raises more questions about what the Chinese Government really knows.”
Scientists cautioned that it was not clear that the genetic material from the virus and from the dogs had been deposited at the same time.
Dr Michael Imperiale, a virologist at the University of Michigan, said: “They could have been deposited there at potentially different times.”
Still, Dr Arturo Casadevall, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who co-authored a recent study with Imperiale examining the origin of the coronavirus, said linking animal and viral material nevertheless added to the evidence of a natural spillover event.
“I would say it strengthens the zoonotic idea,” he said, “… that it came from an animal at the market.”
In the absence of the actual animal that first spread the virus to people, Casadevall said assessing the origins of an outbreak would always involve weighing probabilities. In this case, animals sold at the market were removed before researchers began taking samples in early 2020, making it impossible to find a culprit.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
WHO urges countries to make public their info on Covid origins
Wuhan virus escape probably accidental – US agencies
New studies point COVID origin evidence to Wuhan wet market