Front Burner - How, exactly did COVID-19 begin?

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

The release of a WHO report on the origins of COVID-19 is drawing both international curiosity and concern over China’s transparency. Nature senior reporter Amy Maxmen explains the investigation’s findings as well as criticisms over its access and independence.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. As COVID-19 has gripped the world for over a year now, so too has a mystery. Where exactly this monster virus came from? Yesterday, the World Health Organization and China brought us a little bit closer to an answer.

There is a lot of good leads that are in the recommendation of this report, and we anticipate that many of them, if not all of them, will be followed through because we owe to the world to try to understand what happened, how it did happen, why, and try to prevent something similar to happen again. That's the WHO's lead on this investigation, Peter Ben-Embarek. His team joined scientists in China for four weeks early this year. The result is this 300-page juggernaut of a report. There's a ranking of the most likely and least likely ways that COVID broke out. Even talk about possible spread through frozen food. But there's also lingering concerns over China's potential influence on the report. Yesterday, Canada and 12 countries raised concerns about delays and lack of access to data.

To sort through all of this, I'm joined by Amy Maxman, senior reporter for Nature. I'm very grateful that she's read all 300 pages of this report. Hi, Amy. Thank you for being here. Hi. Nice to be here. It's great to have you. So look, we're more than a year into the pandemic, and this report has been delayed repeatedly. So I can't wait to get a real human explanation of what it concluded. But first, tell me about the circumstances around this investigation that finally gave us this report. Yes. So, you know, there's been calls to investigate the source of the pandemic for a long time. Of course, that's really important because we want to know where

it came from with the hope that we could prevent it from happening again. You know, and there's delays for various reasons. One is that, you know, in the middle of a pandemic, especially like when China was really in the heat of it in the beginning months there in January and February and March, there's not really time to stop and do this sort of more fundamental study. And then also some of the delays, just getting access into China with an international team and getting access to a lot of data. China does hold their information quite closely. So that alone took a number of months. And, you know, how long did this international team have on the ground in China? So they were in China for four weeks, but two of those weeks were spent in quarantine.

So they were there, but they weren't like wandering, but two of those weeks were spent in quarantine. So they were there, but they weren't like wandering around for two of the weeks. And the next two weeks they spent in Wuhan, you know, toured a number of facilities. They met with officials. They talked with a lot of people. They went through data, this sort of thing. Okay. And I just want to be clear here. This is a joint China WHO investigation, right?

I'm glad you asked because it's not quite that clear. The report describes the findings of the Wuhan field visit that was conducted by a group of international scientists and Chinese scientists. Basically, there are 17 Chinese scientists and 17 scientists from other parts of the world, including the U.S., the U.K., Japan, and a number of other countries. A few of those scientists are from the WHO, but it's not really like a WHO report, because to me that sort of sounds like it's WHO and the Chinese government. But no, it was just that I would say WHO organized it, and they did a lot of sort of diplomacy on the back end to make sure that the scientists could get the access that they needed.

OK. And did the report come to any real conclusions about how the virus made its way into humans? You know, I understand they basically rank the most likely to least likely culprits here. And there we looked at four possible pathways for the introduction of the virus. Can you take me through the most likely one first? So the most likely one, they think, is that a human or humans were infected from animals and that the animal that infected them is sort of an intermediate, kind of like a middleman between where this coronavirus usually lives and the animal that passed it to humans. This is the case in a lot of infectious diseases. Take rabies.

Rabies, the common reservoir for rabies is bats. But people often get rabies from dogs or from monkey bites, things like that. rabies from dogs or from monkey bites, things like that. So it's sort of, there's like sort of a middleman that passes it on and the virus can sort of evolve slightly, you know, as it's being passed animal to animal and within animals. Okay. And do we know the original animal and then the intermediary animal? No. The best guesses so far, you know, which are kind of based on a lot of studies that have been done previously is I think bats are a pretty good candidate as a reservoir, just because bats have so many coronaviruses. Different coronaviruses have been found within bats.

But no, the smoking gun isn't there. The closest sequence to SARS-CoV-2 is from a horseshoe bat. But still, it's like around 96% similar, which isn't all that similar. And do they have a sense of the intermediary animal? No, they don't. Short answer is no. There was those kind of teases that it was a pangolin, but we've since discovered that actually that sequence was not very close to what's in humans. You know, I think the ideas I've heard thrown around are various mammals, like some of the ones that we know do get SARS-CoV-2 easily, like cats and ferrets and minks, animals like that have all been found to

carry SARS-CoV-2. So the idea is maybe it's something like that. And did the report address, you know, the location of where this may have originated? You know, I know that there had been a lot of talk about wildlife farms where animals are bred, but then also, of course, the seafood market in Wuhan, which was largely thought to be ground zero. It's believed the virus most likely emerged from this market in Wuhan, probably involving bats. Yeah, so I should say the seafood market,

the name seafood's a bit confusing because actually they sold a whole lot more than just seafood. It's a huge market with more than 1,500 vendors and shops, different type of meats, poultry, seafood, wild animal meats, etc. So the Huanan market, you know, when this first started, that was the original thought about maybe where this had begun. But then, you know, we had seen other cases outside of the market who weren't linked to that. So then it was sort of tossed aside. Well, it's kind of come back in this report. Now, the WHO's team does not conclude that it was from the Huanan market. But if you

read the report, they really spent a lot of time there. And part of that is because they looked at, you know, around 170 people who had symptoms of COVID in December. Around two-thirds of those people said that they had been exposed to animals, this is either living or dead or parts or frozen animals or whatever, but animals of some kind just prior to their symptoms. Another thing is they sequenced the entire genomes of SARS-CoV-2 in some of those early cases, definitely not all of them. And they found that like eight of the earliest sequences are identical and they all come from people who are linked to the Hunan market. So that suggests there was, you know, an outbreak there in a limited amount of time i don't want this to sound like a really overly simplistic question but you know why can they not just figure this out frankly like why is it so hard for them to figure out where this started

and what animals it started in and then how did did it, how it spread to, to humans? That's a really good question. So remember, I think one of the tricks here is we're looking back in time, you know, in an ideal world, the minute we've got this outbreak, a huge investigation starts. We collect all of the animals at the markets and sample them all for SARS-CoV-2. But what happened is like in the middle of a crisis, it sounds like Chinese researchers did take some samples from the market, but their priority was shutting down the markets. And so between January and March, there were some samples collected. You know, they took swabs of trash cans and took some samples from some animals stored in freezers. But they didn't collect a lot of the animals or most of the animals even sold in these markets and vegetables.

For that matter, there's no reason to just favor animals. You know, there is outbreaks of salmonella and other, you know, deadly pathogens. of salmonella and other, you know, deadly pathogens. So they didn't take all of the samples you would ideally want and test them for COVID and isolate virus so that we could sequence the genomes. That would have been the ideal way to do it. This is all a year later. So it's really quite some detective work to try and go back and piece this all together. Right. I understand this report. It also deals with some other theories about how this virus may have originated and also spread. One of them has to do with frozen food. And can you talk to me about this one? Then we also look at the possibility of frozen food products or contaminated products

being a vehicle for the virus, allowing the virus to enter the Wuhan area from further away. The frozen food ideas and outbreak that happened in Beijing was kind of traced back to some frozen goods. And so there's a thought that maybe that's how that started and maybe that's how the whole pandemic began. But they didn't find a lot of support suggesting that it would be frozen animals as opposed to animals of any other kind. So there's just sort of not a lot of weight to that one. Okay. I know another one that we've heard quite a bit about, people will have probably heard it in part because the former president of the United States touted this one

quite a bit, that it could have originated in a lab. And my question is, have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus? Yes, I have. Yes, I have.

And I think... And where did the report land on this one? So the report calls that possibility very unlikely. And we try to stay to what are the hard facts we have. We try to stay away from suspicions, ideas, theories, and so on. People who are worried about a lab leak suggest that, you know, either accidentally or intentionally, researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology kind of created this virus and released it into the world. So these researchers went to the institute and they talked to a lot of the researchers there and the report details their discussions. So for example, there was an idea that maybe somebody who worked at the institute was working on a SARS-CoV-2 virus, got infected, and then, you know,

wandered out into the city. And maybe that's why, you know, you get this outbreak at the market. But there's a few things that they pointed out there. So one, the researchers at the Institute said they tested everybody who worked there for antibodies and nobody tested positive. They also said they are not working on any viruses that are very closely related to SARS-CoV-2. They were working on some that are related to SARS-1. These are sort of sister groups, but they're not very close. Then they pointed out that, you know, some of the viruses that are closer to SARS-CoV-2, like the one found in horseshoe bass that's 96% similar or the one found in pangolins,

those are actually closer than the ones that they were looking at in the lab. You know, look, I think we've already seen pushback on the lab theory, right? Even within the WHO on this, from the organization's director general, right? He is saying that he doesn't believe that the assessment was extensive enough. And talk to me a little bit about why you think he's saying that. Yeah. So, I mean, I can't get in his head, but I can say that Dr. Tedros at the WHO and I think other people who might also point out that they wish the lab assessment had been deeper. It's not necessarily saying that they think that there was a lab leak, to be clear. There's, you know, the overwhelming majority of scientists think the evidence is much stronger on the idea that it comes from animals.

There's a lot of evidence suggesting it's that way. This is precedence. So it's not to say that the 300 pages of reporting are incorrect. But it is true that when you read the report, it's pretty flimsy on the lab assessment. I mean, like I said, they went and they talked with researchers. You know, some people might say that all of those researchers at the Wuhan Institute are lying. And my sources don't feel like they're lying, to be clear. But, you know, what would you expect from it? I guess it depends on what would you expect from a real investigation.

Can you go and talk to every single researcher privately about what happened there? Can you go through all of the lab notebooks? Can you test all of the samples they ever had there? And what Dr. Tedros is saying is I think he wants to make it clear that he is not about to say, we did the most serious investigation of a lab one could do. We, of course, said it immediately and have, I think, said it throughout the course of the past months that nobody would expect that this mission would have come up with the final answer and that we will have showed up at the end of the mission

holding whatever animal in our hands and said here is the culprit that was never the intention or the expectation. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo.

50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I want to talk a little bit more about China here. And there's been a lot of concern, as you said, that they put up barriers, that they resisted investigation, that they initially blocked a U.N. team from entering China, denied them access to some records. And then, you know, we're also hearing from countries and leaders as well.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised concerns about this study on Sunday. We've got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it. And then on Tuesday, the U.S., Canada, and 11 other countries signed this letter saying they're concerned about a lack of data and transparency. And based on what you saw in this report, and what the researchers have told you, how much should we be worried about China's influence here? I don't think this report should just be thrown away. I think that would be really unfortunate. I don't think there is any evidence suggesting that,

you know, Beijing officials wrote this whatsoever. And I think it's only fair to say there's a lot of politics going on here, you know, between the U.S. and China. And that very much influences how people see the report. As far as the statement from countries goes, that statement was an interesting one to me. That one didn't really suggest that they're not trusting the report. To me, when my read of the statement was that they're saying they want more information and they want China to be more forthcoming, as in, you know, they want China to fork over all of the data they have a lot more easily. And I should say the WHO team leader, Peter Ben-Embarek, has acknowledged that quote, politics was always in the room. Of course, there was political pressure from all sides.

But I think we were able to create a space for the two group of scientists that were together. We had nothing to hide. So there was no problem working in an open environment. And also, you know, just to keep on this for a little bit longer, earlier this month, also a group of 26 scientists actually wrote a letter calling out the limitations of the investigation. Our producer, Derek, talked to one of those scientists, Dr. Philippa Lentzos, and she said this really didn't amount to a proper internal investigation at all. The data that is provided is basically reporting back from studies that were conducted by Chinese colleagues.

There's very little data that's been collected by the international experts. Dr. Lentzos thinks the report doesn't have enough evidence for how it ranks the likelihood of the different COVID theories that we talked about. have enough evidence for how it ranks the likelihood of the different COVID theories that we talked about. So for example, she's pointing out that she doesn't think it has enough evidence for why the virus leaking from a laboratory is extremely unlikely. What we need now is a credible investigation. Because what we've got at the moment is a report that sure, it provides some new data. But the trade-off for that new data is that the Beijing government appears to have ticked the box for an international investigation and will now use this to its full advantage by shifting attention away from China and demanding other countries undergo investigations. She says we can't ignore how this scientific question is also a hugely political one. we can't ignore how this scientific question is also a hugely political one. Are you ultimately concerned that politics is interfering with our ability to get answers, even to get more

information and more data from China? The letter from these researchers, it's notable they posted that before they even saw the report. Another thing worth noting is, you know, the way that this works, kind of, and what are the levers for control to get what you want. So if the goal is to have a really good investigation where they have as much access as they want, it seems to me that beating their fists on a table and saying that we need this right now, we're not going to believe anything except for exactly what we want, isn't the way they're going to get there. The WHO is made up of member countries, which includes China and includes the US and includes like 194 other member states. they have to kind of work through diplomatic channels. There are no kind of legal levers that they have to say that they do get to bust down the door and do what they want.

Right, because you also have to think, how good can a report like this be when these guys only had like four weeks on the ground, two weeks once they finished quarantining? Yes, that's exactly it. And I think another kind of misconception is that this is the concluding report, but it's not. In fact, it's the first investigation. So everybody I spoke with are saying, you know, what this like picking out the suspects who are super fishy. Does it mean that they have figured out everything? No, but they know here's a suspect that's super

fishy. We want to go and look more closely at that avenue. another very uh simplistic question that i just i just want to talk to you about before we go today you know this idea that we need to get to the bottom of this like what why do we need to get to the bottom of this what would it give us to help prepare for the next pandemic or prevent the next pandemic? You know, if we find that, for example, this outbreak began with a farm that farmed wildlife, say there's a farm that farmed raccoon dogs, which I just learned are a thing. If we found that's where it began. Sorry, I also just learned that those are a thing too. I'm going to try and say it as much as I can. I'm from Toronto. We're a big raccoon city,

but they're like really a hybrid between dogs and raccoons. They're really cool. And I thought of them because one of the researchers I spoke with went to the Huanan market in 2014. And he says he took tons of photos of raccoon dogs in cages being sold. So, sorry, back to the point. Back to the point. The point is, if they find out that there's an animal that this came from, what sort of ways can you prevent the outbreak from happening? I think with the Nipah virus, there was a study that found that people were being infected, There was a study that found that people were being infected partly because of bat guano dropping into the buckets where people were collecting sap from trees. So they were able to put like sort of covers over the buckets and therefore maybe stop outbreaks that way. And if let's say, which right now we don't have any evidence for a lab leak, but let's say that does turn out to be the case, then we really do need to be more careful with even having these labs exist in the first place. And I think along these

lines, some of the reasons why a lot of the scientific community is worried about a lot of these sort of just claims that are often really baseless and not based on any evidence that the coronavirus came from a lab, part of their fear is, you know, just saying that can be really harmful because then the next step you want to take is to shut down these labs. And it's worth noting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they were the first lab to sequence the coronavirus that was infecting people in December. Then they posted that online. And that's completely why we got diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2. That's why we could quickly start making a vaccine and developing drugs. So if that lab didn't exist, we wouldn't

have that information as quickly. Wow. I hadn't thought about it like that. Also, it's incredible to hear you say that, you know, it's possible that a pandemic like this could be prevented by something as simple as putting covers over buckets. But lots for us to think about here. Amy, thank you so much for this conversation. It was so fascinating. Thanks. So I mentioned how Canada issued a joint statement with 12 other countries raising

concerns about this investigation. Well, before we go today, I just wanted to read you a little bit of that letter. Quote, scientific missions like these should be able to do their work under conditions that produce independent and objective recommendations and findings. The letter goes on. this pandemic, but also to lay a pathway to a timely, transparent, evidence-based process for the next phase of the study, as well as for the next health crisis. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.