Robert Garry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane medical school in Louisiana, got a call from his university management telling him that agents from the FBI and CIA had requested a chat about his research into the origins of Covid-19.
Garry agreed and on 30 July three agents flew down to Louisiana to talk to him in person.
The meeting, held at a university conference room, began at 9am and ended at about 5pm. “I presented my evidence to the agents, who were properly trained scientists themselves. They asked all the right questions,” Garry told the Guardian.
“I told them: there is no way this virus could have been a manufactured weapon. There is also no evidence to suggest it was a lab leak. But I’m also conscious there are people out there who will always disagree.”
Their conversation came two months after Joe Biden ordered US intelligence to investigate how the pandemic began.
In normal circumstances, investigating an emerging infectious disease outbreak is a purely scientific inquiry, as was the case with Sars in 2003 and with Mers a decade later. But the search for the origin of the Covid pandemic has come in the middle of a global controversy that has mixed public health, domestic politics and international diplomacy.
It has also coincided with the west’s growing distrust in the Chinese government and Beijing’s “wolf warrior” style of aggressive public diplomacy, which has resulted in many western capitals recalibrating their relationship with China.
“It takes two to tango,” said Prof Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow in global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, a thinktank in New York. “At the beginning Beijing seemed to acquiesce to being the country of origin of the outbreak,” he said.
Chinese officials seemed to acknowledge that the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan was where Sars-CoV-2 first emerged. “What happened after was that all kinds of wild theories began to pop up from both the US and China,” said Huang.
Some of the those sprung took place on Twitter. They included tweets from the Republican senator Tom Cotton on 30 January that linked the virus to a laboratory in Wuhan, and another on 12 March from Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, that promoted the theory that the US military brought coronavirus to Wuhan.
“That’s how things began to go [in a] downward spiral,” said Huang.
WHO inquiry questioned
Despite the tit-for-tat rhetoric, there has been some progress. Almost a year after the pandemic was declared, a team of scientists from the World Health Organization was in January finally allowed to enter China for an investigation. It was a politically charged mission from the start, with every single interaction between the scientists and the Chinese authorities heavily scrutinised by the world’s media.
The team concluded it was “extremely unlikely” Covid had leaked from a lab and said the virus may have jumped from animals to humans. However, the WHO scientists presented little in the way of proof to dismiss the first hypothesis or back the second one after the trip. And the conclusion did not convince those who have long cast doubt on the WHO’s credibility.
Referring to the investigation, Dr Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, told a British parliamentary committee in December: “Let us be clear that this was not a scientific process.” She suggested the WHO had been incompetent in organising the investigation and was too credulous in trusting the Chinese authorities.
Richard Horton, the editor in chief of the Lancet medical journal defended the organisation during the same hearing. “There was no silencing of the WHO; there was no silencing of the investigation team that went to Wuhan,” he said.
The credibility of the investigation did seem to be dented by the fall from grace of the British scientist Dr Peter Daszak, a leading figure in the mission. In June, he was accused of conflict of interest owing, primarily, to his “close relationship” with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the laboratory at the centre of the leak theory, and the person in charge of it, Dr Shi Zhengli – widely known as China’s “bat woman”.
The plot thickened further in July, when the head of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged China to be transparent and said it was premature to rule out the lab-leak theory. A month later, the WHO said again that all theories on the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak were “on the table”, and urged Chinese scientists to carry out their own investigations.
Later in August, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a summary report that the investigation ordered by Biden in May was inconclusive about the virus’s origins. A full report was released in late October said the virus was not weaponised and was unlikely to have been genetically engineered but the US intelligence community remained divided over its most probable origins. “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident,” the report said.
China dismissed the report as “political and false”. Beijing has also threatened proponents of efforts to trace the origin of the virus from the start, with Australia among those to feel its displeasure. China sees the calls from the international community as “politicisation” of science, but critics say Beijing has response has been just as political, if not more so.
Others, including the US infectious diseases expert Dr Anthony Fauci think the way China responded is typical of how its vast bureaucracy deals with things of this nature. “Even when they’re not hiding anything, they act that way,” he told the New York Times in June, referring to China’s initial response to the Sars outbreak in 2003.
“Yet if you look the way they acted early on, that’s the nature of the way the Chinese, when they have something that goes on in their own country, they just act in a very put-offish way. They’re not forthcoming with information. Does that mean that they’re really lying and hiding something? I don’t know,” Fauci said.
‘Last chance’
In early October, the WHO announced it had assembled a group of 26 experts to revive the stalled inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. One senior official said it may be the “last chance to understand the origins of this virus” in a collegiate manner.
Garry welcomed this development. He noted that despite the political rows, substantial progress had been made in the last few months. In September, for example, scientists found three viruses in bats in Laos were more similar to Sars-CoV-2 than any previously known ones.
“This is a huge breakthrough, and adds further evidence to a nature origin hypothesis,” he said, adding that he was “100% certain” the Huanan seafood market was where the virus first emerged.
“We are now seeing more evidence of that after investigations into stall owners, some of whom were believed to be selling wild animals such as raccoon dogs.”
Huang said Garry’s interpretation was one of the many theories on which the global science community needed to reach a consensus. “But what’s unfortunate is that China and the west are entering an impasse. China is not forthcoming and the west does not trust China,” Huang said.
“In the process of the tit for tat, the window of opportunity for scientists to find the real origin of the virus is closing. The state of affairs is making the origin-tracing even more difficult.”
