China’s coronavirus probe delay ‘inexcusable’

It was ‘unconscionable’ of China not to allow global investigators into the country to probe the origins of SARS-CoV-2 for a year.

Professor of global health law at Washington’s Georgetown University Lawrence Gostin.

It was “unconscionable” of China not to allow global investigators into the country to probe the origins of SARS-CoV-2 for a year, according to a prominent authority on global health law who says the World Health Organisation has been “overly diplomatic” in giving credence to the communist nation’s theory that the virus originated in a different country.

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Washington’s Georgetown University and a foremost expert on the World Health Organisation, said China’s intransigence in allowing independent scientists to investigate the origins of the virus should anger the world.

“I think it was unconscionable for China to delay for a full year before allowing WHO to visit Wuhan,” Professor Gostin said.

“Delaying it for a year was completely inexcusable because it meant that we probably will never truly know the origins of the virus.

“It’s almost like investigating the scene of the crime a year later after the crime scene has been scrubbed.”

A delegation of independent investigators from 15 different countries travelled with WHO representatives to Wuhan this month and completed a series of visits to Wuhan markets, hospitals and research laboratories, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Australia pushed hard last year for the independent investigation, triggering a furious diplomatic response from China.

One of the WHO team, Australian microbiologist Dominic Dwyer, has now revealed the reasons for the investigators’ finding that a leak from the virology institute’s laboratory was “extremely unlikely” as the pandemic origin.

“We were not equipped to do a forensic examination of the books, so to speak,” Professor Dwyer said. “But we certainly pushed them hard on the processes and biosafety.”

Professor Dwyer said the researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who were studying a type of bat coronavirus called RaTG13, were only working on genetic sequences and had not cultured the live virus.

“It would be very, very unusual to get a lab accident if you just had a patient sample or a sample from a bat or an animal, because there’s not that much virus there,” Professor Dwyer said. “It’s if you grow the virus in the lab, and start doing experiments with it, that’s when laboratory leaks tend to occur.”

The WHO investigators found that SARS-CoV-2 most likely crossed into humans from an animal such as a bat via an intermediary host. But they also left open the possibility that it could have been imported in to China in frozen food, which Professor Gostin cast as an “overly diplomatic” suggestion.

“I’m perplexed at why WHO didn’t just settle on the most obvious and most likely cause which is that there was some kind of a zoonotic event,” Professor Gostin said. “Instead they’ve given credence to a Chinese narrative that it may have occurred somewhere else in the world.”