Experts urge China to allow WHO to continue Covid origins study

Beijing has refused access for the second phase of the UN agency’s investigation for more than two years.

Dominic Dwyer, right, in Wuhan in January 2021. Picture: AFP

International scientists are pleading with Beijing to end its stonewalling of an investigation into the origins of Covid, which experts say could still uncover crucial information to prevent another coronavirus pandemic.

Dominic Dwyer, the Australian member of the World Health Organisation’s initial investigation in China in January 2021, said “politics” was getting in the way of crucial scientific study. “I get irritated and depressed and some of the antics that go on,” Professor Dwyer told The Australian.

But he said despite the years of stalling it was still possible to confirm the original transmission path of Covid, which has caused the worst international health crisis in 100 years. “I think we can find answers … It is hard work to get the co-operation but, you know, I’m optimistic that problems can be solved,” he said.

Beijing has refused access for the second phase of a WHO investigation for more than two years, well beyond the timeframe scientists had said would be needed to follow up many lines of inquiry.

Last week, the science publication Nature reported that the UN health agency had quietly abandoned its follow-up investigation because of its inability to get co-operation from Beijing.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus rejected the claims the origins investigation had been shelved and said he had recently sent a letter to a top Chinese official asking for access to continue the study.

“We need to know how this started in order to prevent the next one,” Dr Tedros said. “It’s morally very important to know how we lost our loved ones.”

Beijing has been cagey about sharing information with the outside world throughout the pandemic. Doctors in Wuhan were initially punished for discussing the novel coronavirus in late 2019.

A delegation of scientists selected by WHO were not able to conduct their first phase study of Covid’s origins in China until January 2021, as Beijing haggled over the terms of the investigation. Beijing erupted when Dr Tedros said follow-up studies needed to include a laboratory in Wuhan where coronaviruses were studied, along with further investigation into bat to wild animal transmission, the WHO team’s most likely hypothesis.

China’s Foreign Ministry said last week that people were trying to use the tracing of Covid’s origins to “spread disinformation and smear China” and repeated a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus emerged from a US military facility. “Many have raised questions and concerns about US bio-military bases at Fort Detrick and around the world,” said spokesman Wang Wenbin. “The (WHO) should take a close look at these clues, effectively co-operate with relevant countries, and share research findings with all parties in a timely way.”

Chinese officials formally requested the WHO look into the evidence-free theory in 2021 as part of a propaganda drive to convince its population Covid was imported into China.

Professor Dwyer, an infectious diseases expert, said Beijing was getting in the way of important scientific work. “Talk about what might have happened in Fort Detrick is obfuscation,” he said.

It took more than a decade for Chinese scientists to discover the bat colony in China’s south that originally hosted SARS, an earlier deadly coronavirus that first jumped from wild animals to humans in 2002.

Professor Dwyer said China’s refusal to date to allow further investigations had complicated the following up of many promising clues from the first investigation and other studies.

But he said it was possible there may be research conducted by Chinese scientists that has not yet been shared because of political constraints. “What studies have been done in China that we don’t know about?”