The New York TimesFebruary 15, 2021 10:37:17 AM IST
A team of experts selected by the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic returned last week from Wuhan, China, the site of the world’s first outbreak. The team, after breaking the ice with Chinese scientists, plans to produce a joint report on the possible origins of the virus. The two groups of scientists, from China and the WHO, agreed to follow some ideas that the Chinese government has been promoting, such as the possibility that the virus was transported in frozen food. But the WHO team was also frustrated by China’s refusal to hand over raw data for analysis.
Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team and president of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York, is primarily concerned with the animal origins of the virus. A specialist in animal diseases and their spread to humans, Daszak has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a collaboration that last year led the Trump administration to cancel a grant to his organization.
In an interview after his return to New York, he said that the visit had provided some new clues, which all scientists, Chinese and international, agreed that likely pointed to an animal origin in China or Southeast Asia. Scientists have largely discounted claims that the virus originated in a laboratory, saying that possibility was so unlikely that it was not worth further investigation.
He reflected on the atmosphere in Wuhan and his first look at the seafood market where the initial outbreak occurred last year, although it was not the site of the first cases. He also said that the way forward would be simple scientifically, but not politically.
Below is a transcript of the conversation, condensed and edited for further length:
Q: You have been to China and Wuhan many times before. How was this different?
A: Well this was weird. There are certain things that you are supposed to do when you go to China. The first thing to do is have a meeting and then eat. And if you don’t eat, it is considered very rude. This time we spent two weeks on Zoom calls from our quarantined hotel. Then we went to meet in person and we still haven’t eaten with our host. We ate in a separate room.
So it was a very difficult journey, very intense and very emotional. In Wuhan, there is this feeling of post-traumatic shock.
The city was closed, I think, 76 days. They were locked in their apartments, people died and they didn’t know it. And since then, they have been accused of starting a pandemic, and it has been called the Wuhan virus, China virus, and there was only a sense of outrage and sadness.
Q: Did that make it difficult in terms of the scientific purpose of the trip?
A: No. You have a task to do. You have volunteered. You know how it will be. You get caught up in historical significance. I don’t know if we were the first foreigners to walk through the Huanan Seafood Market, which is blocked even for Chinese citizens. The only people who have been there have been Chinese disease researchers. We met with the doctors who treated the first known COVID patients.
These people have been through heartbreaking conditions, and now they are being praised as heroes in China, and then the rest of the world is now waging that war. And China, of course, is absolutely petrified that this virus is taking over again.
When you arrive at the airport, they come on the plane with full PPE; they accompany you on a separate quarantine path; you take the test. They take you to the hotel, you go to your room and they lock you up for two weeks. It is simply severe. The people who come to your door are in full PPE. Your garbage waste, from your hotel room, goes into a yellow bag with a biohazard sign.
It was a totally different experience when I returned home, where I didn’t even get a notification that I had to self-quarantine. I accessed the New York State application, but no one is going to knock on my door and say, “Stay inside.”
Q: Did you learn anything from this trip that you didn’t know before?
A: From day one, the data we were seeing was new and had never been seen outside of China. Who were the vendors at the Huanan seafood market? Where did they get their supply chains from? And what were the contacts of the first cases? How real were the first cases? What other groups were there?
When you asked for more, the Chinese scientists would leave and a couple of days later they had done the analysis and we have new information. It was very useful. At the time, there really wasn’t much that could be said. We were trying not to undermine the process by revealing anything while on the trip.
Q: What can you say now about the market and what you saw?
A: The market closed on December 31 or January 1, and the China CDC sent a team of scientists to try to find out what was going on. It was a very extensive study, rubbing every surface of this place. From the beginning we knew that 500 samples had been collected and that there were many positives, and in that sample there were some animal carcasses or meat. But in reality there was not much public information about what had been done. So we got all that information. And that, for me, was a real eye-opener.
In fact, they had done over 900 swabs by the end, a huge amount of work. They had passed through the sewer system. They had been in the vent to look for bats. They had caught animals in the market. They had caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught a weasel. They had tasted snakes. People had live snakes in the market, live turtles, live frogs.
There were rabbits, carcasses of rabbits. A farm with rabbits could have been really critical. There was talk of badgers, and in China, when they say badger, that means ferret badger. It is a mustelid, related to weasels. Animals that could have been carriers of the coronavirus were entering that market. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that’s clue number one.
There were 10 stalls selling wildlife. There were suppliers from southern China, including Yunnan Province, Guangxi Province, and Guangdong Province. Yunnan province is where the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is found in bats. Guangxi and Guangdong are the places where pangolins were captured. They had viruses nearby.
You have animals entering the market that are susceptible. Some of these come from places where we know the virus’s closest relatives are found. So there is the real red flag.
Now the Chinese group took samples from those animals, and they all came back negative, but it’s only a small group of animals in the freezer that is left behind. We don’t know what else was for sale there. So these two clues are really important.
When we got to visit the market, it was quite surprising for me. The photos you see of that closed market now are of fairly neat buildings with shutters, and you think, ‘This is a typical market in the city, very efficient.’ It doesn’t really look like a live animal market. Once you hit the ground, it is different. It’s pretty shabby.
It looks like a place that would sell live animals. There is a lot of evidence of live aquatic animals, turtle tanks, fish tanks, snakes, that we know were available. What we have now is a clear link and a potential path.
Q: What about the cases that appeared before the outbreak in the seafood market?
A: There was another spread outside the Huanan market. There are other patients who have no ties to the market, quite a few in December. There were other markets. And we know that some of the patients had ties to other markets. We need to work a little more, and then the Chinese colleagues have to work more.
When we sat down as a group, the China team and the WHO team on the last full day of work, and we said, “Let’s run through the hypotheses,” the one that received the most enthusiastic support was this path: wildlife, through from a domesticated wildlife link, in Wuhan.
Q: What is the next step?
A: For the animal chain, it is simple. The providers are known. They know the name of the farm; they know the owner of the farm. You have to go to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. You have to try them. You have to test the community. You have to go look and see if there are any animals left in nearby farms and see if they have evidence of infection, and see if there is any transboundary movement. If the virus is in those southern border states, there may have been some movement in neighboring countries like Vietnam, Laos, or Myanmar. Now we are finding more and more related viruses. There is one in Japan and one in Cambodia, one in Thailand.
For the human side, look for previous cases, clusters; check blood banks for serum, if possible. Something like this is going to be tricky in China, and it will take some persuasion, diplomacy, and energy to get them to do it because, to be honest, searching for the source of this virus within China is not a high priority. Think of the Chinese government. Anywhere this virus is shown to emerge it is a political problem. That’s one of the problems, and it’s clear and obvious to anyone who’s been looking at this.
Q: Do you have a particular animal that you suspect at this time as an intermediate link, more strongly than others?
A: It is too much in the air. We do not know if the civets were for sale. We know that they get infected very easily. We don’t know what the situation is with mink farms in China or other fur farms, such as raccoon dogs, even though they are normally bred in a different part of China. That too needs to be monitored.
But if I had to say which path I would put more weight on, I think the virus emerges in Southeast Asia or South China from bats, entering a domesticated wildlife farm. I’ve been to many of these, and they often have mixed species: civets, ferret badgers, raccoon dogs. Those animals could become infected with bats.
Either the people who work there get infected and bring it in, or the animals are shipped, alive or recently slaughtered, bringing the virus to market. Once you are in a market, be it Huanan or another in Wuhan, you have a dense population of people moving through those markets. And it will be a real potential for an amplification.
Q: Will the new data you saw, for example, about suppliers and their supply chains be in your full report?
A: I hope so. There will be some things that are going to be confidential, no doubt. Patient records are kept highly confidential in China. We have an image in the West of China being authoritarian and they are filming everyone. They can have access to anything. But patient records are very private and some are not accessible.
We wanted to meet with certain patients. They did not want to meet, so they were not pushed to meet with us. There is no reason to believe they were shenanigans. I hope that all the information about suppliers and supply chains is there. But if not, we have seen it. We have it. And we will be following up.
James Gorman. c.2021 The New York Times Company
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She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.