WHO still waiting on COVID origins data from China – DW – 12/31/2024
www.dw.com
Five years since COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan, the UN health agency is calling on China to "share data and access so we can understand the origins" of the global pandemic.

Summary

The WHO reiterated calls for China to provide data on COVID-19 origins, five years after the virus emerged in Wuhan.

The lack of transparency has hindered understanding of the pandemic’s early stages. Initial theories pointed to animal-to-human transmission via Wuhan’s wet market, but speculation about a lab leak persists.

A 2021 WHO-China report deemed a lab leak “extremely unlikely,” though no firm conclusions were reached. China has rejected further investigations.

While most scientists favor natural origins, debate remains, complicating efforts to prevent future pandemics.

  • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝English
    91·
    4 days ago

    Same source says that it definitely came to Europe from China though, a few paragraphs lower:

    These findings do not at all suggest that the virus originated in Italy, but they endorse the idea that the virus was likely spreading in China before the first known cases and that could have been circulated by travelers given direct the connections between China and European and US countries, particularly the Northern West and East Italian regions, which are among the most industrialized and connected areas of Italy. Evidence used to support this hypothesis comes from a comparative genomic analysis of more than 175,000 genomes, which delineated 22 distinct SARS-CoV-2 haplogroups with a broad geographic distribution within China, pointing towards an early emergence and widespread cryptic circulation of the virus well before its isolation in January 2020 [25]. Recently, Kumar et al. reconstructed the mutational history of SARS-CoV-2 using a so called ‘mutation order approach’ (MOA) [26]. From their analysis of more than 174,000 genomes, major mutational fingerprints revealed that it is useful to identify and track the spatiotemporal evolution of novel coronavirus. The progenitor genome identified differed from that of the first coronaviruses sampled in China by three variants, implying that none of the earliest patients represents the index case or gave rise to all human infections. However, multiple coronavirus infections in China, the USA and Europe harbored the progenitor genetic fingerprint in January 2020 and later, suggesting that the progenitor was spreading worldwide months before.

    A recently published letter by Petti et al. summarizes existing evidence that corroborates the infectious disease epidemiology principle of pathogen circulation prior to the recognized outbreak [27]. The eventuality of an early SARS-CoV-2 circulation already relatively sustained in Europe and America is not so astonishing, as SARS-CoV-2 is mainly a respiratory pathogen. Therefore, a novel unknown respiratory virus responsible for severe pneumonia like SARS-CoV-2 could circulate undetected for months or years, be responsible for many deaths, and even become a pandemic, before peculiar characteristics of the disease are noticed that allow for its identification.

    Looks as if the original virus that definitely came from China caused less severe symptoms and was not detected, but still caused infections thus antibody findings.

    Did China do transparent peer-reviewed research into this?

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyzEnglish
      25·
      4 days ago

      I don’t know. But I don’t see how that’s relevant to Wuhan having a lab that studies coronaviruses if the pandemic didn’t start in Wuhan, which even now is still repeated as if it was truth by proper journalists and DW alike.

      • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝English
        3·
        4 days ago

        The first confirmed cases were in Wuhan, and right now, the state of science is that started either in Wuhan or near Wuhan. It’s complicated science because where antibodies were found is still just one datapoint, a precursor can have the same molecular structure on the virus surface, so similar or exactly the same antibodies. Meaning since the discussed proCoV2 was only three base pairs away, it could be producing the same antibodies, be widespread, infect, even kill people, yet not be COVID-19.

        The problem that the Chinese political system doesn’t promote open academic discussion - that the virus is political - doesn’t help either.

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyzEnglish
          23·
          4 days ago

          So your assertion is that we need to seriously consider that a ‘wild’ coronavirus with the same signature as Covid-19 evolved somewhere in China, spread to Italy and elsewhere in Europe and probably dozens of other untested places in the summer of 2019, and - coincidentally - Covid-19 itself mutated in bushmeat or was engineered in Wuhan in an unrelated zoonotic transmission or, uh, “biocrime”?

          Which of us is stretching probabilities to breaking point for political purposes, ‘HK’?

          • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝English
            4·
            4 days ago

            No, it’s the conclusion of the paper cited in your source. The supposed proCoV2 is 3 base pairs away from Wuhan-1, and is 1100 base pairs away from other human-infecting SARS strains.

            Basically there was another similar virus that had the same spike proteins - if you remember the photos, the virus is a spiked ball, the antibodies bond to the spikes. It was a precursor to the Wuhan strain, so basically the fact that there were antibodies in Italy before the Wuhan outbreak just means that similar shit was going around the world before, but not the same shit.

            https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10287595

            Because proCoV2 is three bases different from the Wuhan-1 genome, we estimate that the divergence of the earliest variants of proCoV2 occurred 5.8–8.1 weeks earlier, based on the range of estimated mutation rates of coronavirus genomes (see Materials and Methods). This timeline puts the presence of proCoV2 in late October 2019, which is consistent with the report of a fragment of spike protein identical to Wuhan-1 in early December in Italy, among other evidence (Giovanetti et al. 2020; Li, Wang, et al. 2020; van Dorp et al. 2020; Amendola et al. 2021). The sequenced segment of the spike protein is short (409 bases). It does not span positions in which 49 major early variants were observed, which means that the Italian spike protein fragment can only confirm the existence of proCoV2 before the first coronavirus detection in China.

            I haven’t said anything about labs. Nobody treats the lab theory as a “proven fact”. But it is a proven fact that the specific strain that got dubbed COVID-19 first appeared in the general vicinity of Wuhan.