Coronavirus origins: how unseen Wuhan research notes could hold the answers ? and why lab-leak rumours refuse to die
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Published: 6:30am, 10 Apr, 2021
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The genetic analysis done by Shi?s team last year should have laid to rest any questions concerning a link between Covid-19 and the bat coronaviruses being researched in her Wuhan lab. Except that it did not.
Actions taken by China?s government in the wake of the virus outbreak were part of the reason for this, Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefence Graduate Programme at George Mason University in Virginia, said in a phone interview.
In February last year, the State Council ? China?s cabinet ? ordered that all research related to Covid-19 required government approval before publication, effectively imposing a gag order on the nation?s scientists.
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China?s biosafety labs are inspected by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in Beijing, which also falls under the purview of the State Council.
An employee at CNAS who declined to be identified said by phone that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was classified as a ?secret institute?, so its audits were only available to specially authorised employees.
?We signed a privacy agreement with the Wuhan institute so documents relating to laboratory audits cannot usually be shared with third parties,? he said, giving a number for an authorised official in another department. Four phone calls to that number over several days went unanswered. Three phone calls to the CNAS public relations office were also not answered.
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Professor Wanda Markotter, director of the Centre for Viral Zoonoses at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said cover-ups of lab accidents could be revealed via individual interviews that exposed inconsistencies between researchers? accounts.
?Usually if you speak to different people alone at some point you will get a feeling if something was covered up, because people can?t say exactly the same thing if they are not in the same room. That immediately tells you if you think it?s worth doing an audit,? she said, adding that randomised individual interviews needed to be conducted for this approach to be considered credible.
WHO-appointed mission member Dr Dominic Dwyer, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Sydney, made no mention of individual interviews conducted during the four-hour visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
?We spoke to the scientists there,? Dwyer, who did not respond to an emailed request for comment, wrote in a February 23 article published in The Conversation.
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French data scientist Gilles Demaneuf, who helped organise the March and April open letters, said the Wuhan Institute of Virology shut down its online database holding thousands of genetic sequences for bat coronaviruses in September 2019 ? about three months before the city recorded its first Covid-19 cases.
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Koblentz, the biosecurity specialist, said it was unusual for such a database to be taken offline and never restored, as cybersecurity breaches were usually fixed after companies or government agencies detected a hacking attack.
?Cutting off researchers from this database that had such high demand previously is not consistent with the way governments and labs usually run their operations,? he said.
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Getting to the bottom of what happened in Wuhan before the Covid-19 pandemic began has so far proved elusive, but some of the most experienced scientists interviewed for this story suggested a fairly straightforward solution to exploring the lab-leak theory: laboratory notebooks.
Biochemist Milton Leitenberg, a senior research fellow at the Centre for International and Security Studies at Maryland since 1989, said such notebooks were a researcher?s first recourse ?if anyone challenges your data?.
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Juergen Richt, director of the Centre of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases at Kansas State University, echoed this point and added a suggestion of his own for the labs of Wuhan.
?Make all your experimental work performed in the past years as well as your laboratory notebooks available to the WHO inspectors and selected BSL-4, coronavirus experts around the world,? he said. ?It?s that simple.?
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/healt...ch-notes-could
