If the cordial relationship between Tedros and China had survived the opening months of the pandemic, the strength of their friendship would be tested once again in the early summer of 2020. It was over the very important, yet highly sensitive, issue of how and where the virus originated.
The Sars outbreak in 2003 is thought to have originated in bats in Yunnan province, southwest China, and to have been introduced into markets in the surrounding area through an intermediary host animal. Sars-CoV-2 is believed to have had similar beginnings because of its resemblance to other bat coronaviruses.
However, the caves in Yunnan province are more than a thousand miles from Wuhan, and no bats containing such viruses have ever been found near that city. If an intermediate animal, or indeed a human, had been infected by a bat in Yunnan, how could this very infectious virus be carried on such a long journey to Wuhan without causing a single noticeable outbreak along the way?
The Chinese had tested thousands of animals in Wuhan and the surrounding areas, but not one had come up positive for the virus. Chinese scientists had also rejected the suggestion that the virus entered through the Huanan seafood market in the city, which was connected to some of the cases in December 2019.
Extensive sample-testing at the market failed to show a link between any of the animals there and the virus. It was also clear that many of the early human cases had no link to the market, and the conclusion was that the market was a crowded environment in which the virus had spread, rather than the point of introduction into Wuhan.
But there was an elephant in the room. Coronaviruses found in the Yunnan bat caves, including the world’s closest known match to Sars-CoV-2, were being kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time of the outbreak. To many it seemed a remarkable coincidence that, of all the 600 cities in China, the virus began in Wuhan, the home of an institute that houses the world’s largest collection of coronaviruses from wild bats and has a team of scientists who often travel to those same Yunnan caves.
The scientists had been seeking out coronavirus-infected bats and then transporting the viruses back to the laboratory in Wuhan. There they carried out highly controversial “gain of function” experiments to make the viruses more infectious to humans. The work was designed to help develop vaccines to pre-empt a potential coronavirus outbreak, but many scientists had warned that one safety lapse could itself cause a deadly pandemic.
Only a tiny handful of labs in the world carried out such high-risk experiments, and in 2018 inspectors sent by the US embassy in Beijing to the Wuhan institute had flagged serious safety concerns there. A US diplomatic cable leaked to The Washington Post stated: “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
There were therefore questions about whether the pandemic had been caused by a leak from the Wuhan institute or one of its researchers who had been infected in the bat caves and then accidentally carried the virus back to the city. It was certainly not inconceivable: the Sars virus had leaked from the National Institute of Virology lab in Beijing in 2004. Nine people were infected by the outbreak and one died.
There were serious concerns about what the Wuhan institute had been doing with the world’s closest known match to the Covid-19 virus, which was the strongest lead in the hunt for the pandemic’s origin. It had been found eight years ago by Wuhan scientists in an abandoned mine, where it had been linked to deaths caused by a coronavirus-type respiratory illness. But the significance of the deaths had been kept secret by the Chinese authorities until a Sunday Times investigation uncovered them in the summer of last year. The lab has refused to answer questions on whether it was experimenting on the virus in the run-up to the pandemic.
Indeed China had been reluctant to address many questions about the pandemic’s origins since January 2020, other than to issue blanket denials. It did not want the ignominy of being found culpable for the world’s worst pandemic for a century.