Pangolins? Raccoon dogs? Laboratories?: The new hypotheses about the origin of the coronavirus

Three years and four months.

It is the time that has already elapsed since in Wuhan, a city in China whose name was then not familiar to almost anyone outside the country, cases of a strange pneumonia began to be detected.

Despite the time that has elapsed, the origin of the coronavirus remains a mystery, embroiled in a debate that is more political than scientific and fueled by the opacity of Beijing.

Although from time to time new clues appear.

The last one points to the raccoon dogs (a species from Asia) that were in the Huanan market, in Wuhan.

The climate is not conducive to impartial investigation.

The World Health Organization reproaches China for its opacity when it comes to providing essential data to try to prevent an episode of that caliber from repeating itself.

Where and how the virus jumped to the human being continues to be the subject of reproach between Beijing and Washington.

In the capital of the United States, how the covid arose confronts the political class, divides the intelligence agencies and occupies hearings and sessions of legislators in Congress.

On April 18, a room with high wood paneling and thick blue carpeting, room 2154 of the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill in Washington, will see the appearance of some of the former officials in charge of analyzing the origin of the pandemic.

A group of legislators, the subcommittee on the origins of the covid, has summoned them for a hearing in which they will be questioned for hours about "China's role in the origins of covid-19 and the intelligence around where the virus came from." covid-19″.

It is the second hearing of its kind in the US Congress so far this year and many more are being announced.

President Joe Biden has signed legislation to declassify what his secret services know about how the coronavirus arose.

An investigation that he ordered produced inconclusive results last year and the agencies in charge of scrutinizing the case are unable to agree.

All the possible theories are still standing, although their defenders cling more to their ideology, or their concept of China, than to the available scientific data.

The most widespread thesis among scientists is that it was a zoonosis, a jump from an animal —probably a bat— to the human being through a third species, perhaps a pangolin.

Or another animal.

It could have happened in nature.

It could have happened on a farm.

It could have happened in the Huanan market, that center for the sale of food in the center of the city in whose 653 stalls animals of all kinds —alive, dead, domestic or wild— were crowded in more than dubious hygienic conditions for consumption.

Or it could have happened, according to the opinion of even some US government agencies, in a laboratory in Wuhan.

Beijing, for its part, from time to time replies that the coronavirus could have come from a US military laboratory, a theory at least as accepted among the Chinese population as that of the Wuhan laboratory is among the US.

The division of opinions even reaches the heart of the Government in Washington.

Last month, an Energy Department report concluded that, in its opinion, the virus had "most likely" escaped from a laboratory.

But he also qualified that he came to that conclusion with little security.

Other official bodies in the US have reached divergent conclusions.

The only thing that unites all of them is that none of them have much confidence in their respective theses or have solid evidence to support them.

The director of the FBI, Chris Wray, shares the theses of the Department of Energy, as he has declared in Congress.

Four other government agencies lean toward a natural cause.

Two more among those investigating the origins of the disease have not spoken.

In this confused climate, even the WHO, at the beginning of the pandemic so cautious with Beijing, is now contributing to the criticism.

"More than three years after this outbreak began, we still do not know how it occurred due to China's lack of cooperation to be transparent in sharing data, conducting the necessary investigations and sharing the results," criticized the director of the organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was once criticized for his deference to Chinese authorities.

From the outset, China tried to hide as far as possible the data it had on the origin of the disease.

The first data on the genome of the virus were shared with the world, but only following a personal initiative by the doctors who did so.

A first WHO mission was able to visit Wuhan very briefly but did not have access to the market or the first patients.

The second WHO mission arrived in January 2021 with all fanfare.

A group of international scientists, who had been given the go-ahead by Beijing one by one.

These experts were able to visit a hospital, the market or talk to covid patients and former merchants who had food stalls in Huanan.

But, after leaving China, they recognized that their work had been carried out with enormous constraints, and that the Chinese health authorities - who worked closely with them during the weeks they were in the city on the banks of the Yangtze - had not given them provided the raw data they had requested on the first patients.

raccoon dogs

The disagreement resulted in the obvious: no other team from the UN health organization has returned to China to resume the investigation, nor does it appear likely in the foreseeable future.

Even the last thing that has been known has been a bit of a coincidence.

A group of scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published in a public file called GISAID a series of genomic data found in samples obtained from the surfaces of the Huanan market.

That data was deleted almost immediately by those who published it.

But by then a French scientist, Florence Debarre, had already downloaded them.

And a group of Western experts began to work with them.

The team, which includes ecologist Michael Woborey of the University of Arizona, found raccoon dog genetic material in several samples taken in Huanan, including some obtained from a shopping cart and from a poultry plucking machine.

These samples were located in a very specific area of ​​the market, precisely the one where wild animals were sold.

The samples themselves do not show that this raccoon-like animal, from the fox family and extensively farmed for its fur, was responsible for the virus jumping to humans.

But they do narrow the circle around Huanan a little more, closed since the pandemic broke out.

But the thesis of an escape from a laboratory cannot be completely ruled out either, given the opacity that reigns around the data.

A theory that some Chinese scientists came to consider before dismissing it, at least officially: when the first cases began to be detected in December 2019, the Chinese expert on bat viruses Shi Zhengli —nicknamed Batwoman for her extensive knowledge of these animals— thought that the coronavirus could have come from his laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, just a dozen kilometers from Huanan.

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, she also noted that she had ruled out the possibility after carrying out verifications.

It would not have been the first time that a coronavirus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory.

In 2004, the WHO had already shown its concern, after two researchers from the National Institute of Virology in Beijing became infected with the SARS virus in a laboratory.

The first fell ill at the end of March of that year, but China hid it for almost a month.

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