No lab in the world held a virus close enough to Covid-19 that it could be manipulated to create the pandemic strain, the British zoologist whose company funded Wuhan researchers has said.
Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, was responding to claims that scientists had dismissed the lab leak theory because they did not want to stop doing dangerous ‘gain of function’ experiments to increase the infectivity of viruses.
The pandemic began in Wuhan city, close to where scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been importing bat coronaviruses for experimentation.
Last week Anton van der Merwe, a professor of molecular immunology at Oxford University, warned that scientists involved in similar work as WIV were worried that a ban would be reimposed on such testing.
But in a letter to the Telegraph refuting the claim, Mr Daszak, said: “He (Prof Van der Merwe) states that these experiments were being performed in Wuhan on SARS-CoV-2 like viruses.
“This is incorrect. Experiments at WIV involved bat coronaviruses related to the original SARS-CoV, not SARS-CoV-2, and there is no evidence that any lab in the world had a virus genetically close enough to SARS-CoV-2 that is could be manipulated to become that virus.”
However critics pointed out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has admitted housing a bat coronavirus called RaTG13, which had 96.9 per cent similarity to Covid-19.
Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid-19, said that it would only need the addition of a new spike protein, a few gene changes, the inclusion of a furin cleavage site to increase infectivity and some lab evolution to create the virus.
In reply, Mr Daszak said: “There’s really no way RaTG13 could have anything to do with SARS-CoV-2 – the spike protein and the backbone sequence of the virus are too genetically distinct to make it possible that this virus could have rapidly evolved into SARS-CoV-2 or be manipulated genetically to become SARS-CoV-2.”
Other experts said that Covid-19 could also be a consensus sequence - essentially a mish-mash of other viruses.
In a leaked grant proposal made by EcoHealth Alliance and WIV in 2018, researchers had proposed synthesising viral genomes to make a consensus sequence based on viruses that were 95 per cent identical to each other.
The proposal, which was rejected by US military research agency DARPA because it ‘could have put local communities at risk’ also proposed the insertion of human-specific furin cleavage sites into Sars like coronaviruses - which could have made them very infectious for humans.
Dr Monali Rahalkar, a Scientist in Microbiology at the Agharkar Research institute in India said the changes would have been possible with the viruses available.
“A consensus sequence can be created if they have similar viruses or using other bioinformatics tools,” she said.
In his letter, Mr Daszak claimed that the experiments carried out by WIV would not count as ‘gain of function’ because the bat coronaviruses involved had never infected humans.
‘Response begins with smart surveillance’
“The SARS-related research conducted under NIH funding prior to the pandemic at the Wuhan Institute of Virology only dealt with bat coronaviruses that had never been shown to infect people, let alone cause morbidity and/or mortality in humans, and therefore by definition was not gain-of-function research,” he said.
He added: “Professor van der Merwe also suggests that it is unlikely that identifying potentially dangerous organisms in the wild will help prevent pandemics.
“A One Health strategy for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response begins with smart surveillance to identify potential pathways of transmission and to take actions to control the risks of zoonotic spillover.
“Surely those risks justify undertaking the kind of research that was supported by the US.”
However Prof Van der Merwe described Mr Daszak’s response as ‘petty’ and a clear conflict of interest.
“The precise definition of gain of function experiments varies,” he said, “The fact that my definition is different from the definition in a US regulation is not relevant.
“He is criticising something that I did not write. I argued that experiments that try to enable a virus to better infect human cells (or “humanised” mice) are unlikely to help prevent a future pandemic.”
Mr Daszak was instrumental in organising a letter published in The Lancet early in the pandemic that effectively shut down scientific debate into whether coronavirus was manipulated or leaked from the lab.
Emails have since come to light showing that Mr Daszak chose not to sign the letter himself so that it did not link back to the collaboration between EcoHealth, WIV and other scientists involved in bat coronavirus, in case it appeared ‘self-serving.’