The COVID-19 virus origin

Finding the truth

The World Health Assembly in May last year requested Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General, to work closely with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Six months later, in November, the terms of reference for a China-WHO joint study were published with information, data and samples for the study’s first phase being collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team. The non-Chinese team would build on the analysis.

The team found no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident. The team only noted that a zoonotic spillover or a migration of the virus from a wild animal was “likely or very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely.”

But critics say the two theories have never been given “balanced consideration.”

They, for instance, note that it is only four of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes that addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.

They cite Tedros Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, who noted that the report’s consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility.

Writing in the American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal of Aug.15, Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical professor of medicine noted how in January, 2020, two hypotheses emerged about the origin of the novel coronavirus: that it began in a bat, then infected another animal before spreading to humans in a Wuhan “wet market” where wild animals are sold for meat; or that it emerged from the Wuhan laboratory.

However, the experts insist the wet market hypothesis was pushed by the Chinese CDC and WHO. They argued that COVID-19 was like SARS and MERS, earlier Coronaviruses that emerged from bats and spread through an intermediate animal.

But other experts point out that neither the SARS nor MERS virus has evolved to the point where it can transmit efficiently from one human to the next. There have been fewer than 10,000 cases of each virus worldwide since SARS was discovered in 2003 and MERS in 2012.

They say a virus coming out of a bat cave and infecting humans by the millions is not biologically plausible. They say if it had evolved slowly over many years in nature, someone would have known of it. According to them, therefore, the SARS-CoV-2 was manipulated or ‘taught’ to infect humans.

The Lab-leak theory

The supporters of this theory make reference to the presence of a big biological research facility in Wuhan—the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) which has been studying Coronaviruses in bats for years.

They say this institute is just under an hour’s drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of COVID-19 infections were registered in Wuhan.

The supporters say it could have leaked from a WIV lab and spread to the wet market. Most argue it would have been an unaltered virus collected from the wild, rather than engineered.

The controversial theory first emerged early in the pandemic. A Harvard University study of satellite images was said to show a shutdown of traffic around the Wuhan lab in the late summer and early autumn (late August and early September) of 2019. Weeks later, in late September, the hospital parking lots were filling up.

But some think this is just super power politics.

Moses Mulumba, the executive director of the Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development, a Kampala-based non-profit that advocates for the right to health, told The Independent on Aug.26 that trying hard to pin the virus within a particular jurisdiction “is not helping the world to move forward.”

“This was what the former American president was keen on and that is why he kept on referring to it as the China virus,” he said, “I think the current presidency in the U.S has an opportunity to redirect the debate so that the world can get to the bottom of where the virus came from.”

Mulumba told The Independent that much as he understands the “super power” dynamics within the WHO, it is time the UN agency took a lead role in the virus origins debate.

Prof. Kaleebu thinks ‘the lab engineered virus theory’ is sometimes exaggerated. He says that the view of many scientists; including most American scientists, is that the virus crossed from an animal host into humans.

“The lab theory was mainly pushed by Donald Trump, the former U.S president who was always at loggerheads with the Chinese government,” he told The Independent recently.

“This virus behaves like the others like the HIV, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS),” he told The Independent

Kaleebu adds that politicization of the origin of the Covid-19 was bound to happen.

“It was the same with the origin of HIV,” he says, “But science always prevails because the majority of people believe in facts.”

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