Scientist on WHO team defends its findings

SYDNEY • An Australian scientist on a World Health Organisation (WHO) expert team sent to China on a Covid-19 origin-tracing mission defended the team's findings amid speculation the virus might have leaked from a laboratory.

In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last Friday, the University of Sydney's Professor Dominic Dwyer, who along with scientists from other countries spent four weeks in Wuhan for the WHO mission this year, said there was no evidence to back up the lab escape theory.

The team concluded that Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, most likely arose in bats, and then spread to humans via an as-yet unidentified intermediary animal. They considered viral escape from a laboratory extremely unlikely.

United States President Joe Biden last week ordered US intelligence agencies to carry out extra investigations into the source, including if it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

"The US intelligence forces were asked to show if they had any information that might be helpful. They haven't done that as yet," Prof Dwyer said.

"The fact that President Biden says he's getting conflicting reports from his intelligence agencies, to me, suggests there is no clear evidence, otherwise it would be obvious what was going on," he said.

"I think we just need to see the evidence. If we've got it, let's act on it. But show us the money," the ABC report cited Prof Dwyer as saying.

The virus was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019. The two prevailing competing theories are that the virus jumped from animals or that it escaped from the virology laboratory in Wuhan.

The lab, China's leading Sars research facility, is not far from the Huanan Seafood Market, which early in the health crisis was cited as the most likely place where animal-to-human transmission of the virus may have taken place. The market was also the site of the first known Covid-19 super-spreader event.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal, citing a US intelligence report, said that three researchers from the Wuhan lab had sought hospital care in November 2019. China said it was completely untrue that three workers had fallen ill.

Prof Dwyer said the authorities in Wuhan had been "pretty open" with the team in its investigation. "The evidence we got and the questions we asked and the answers we got are really what I would expect if I was doing the same investigation in Australia or New Zealand or somewhere similar," he said.

Prof Dwyer said in the ABC interview that it could take "many, many years" to discover the origins of diseases and that it would be achieved only via cooperation.

"You have to develop cooperation; you have to work with people in an open and transparent manner to get things done," he said. "The more people fight about it, or people use politics to score points or whatever it might be, the less likely you are to get the cooperation to work together to sort it out," he said.

XINHUA, REUTERS