One scientist said the world may never know the true source of the Covid-19 virus, because research into its origins has become ‘highly politicized’.
Dr. George Fu Gao, who is believed to know more than any other human being about the Chinese infection causing the lockdown, said the debate over how the epidemic started was “very sensitive and very politicized”.
The former director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention made the statement at the Rhodes Policy Summit in London, where he also said he didn’t see anything ‘unusual’ about Covid at first.
He also said on Friday that there was “no evidence” that the virus emerged from animals, ruling out theories about raccoon dogs.
The comments come after the FBI said last month that the lab leak theory was the ‘most likely’ explanation, though Beijing denies the virus came from one of its laboratories.
There is no evidence yet to show which animal the virus causing COVID may have come from, said Dr. George Gao, the former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, on Friday.
The question of whether the global outbreak began with a spread from wildlife sold on the market or a leak from a Wuhan laboratory just eight miles across the Yangtze River has sparked intense debate about how to prevent the next pandemic.
Dr Zhao, 61, who ran the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention when Covid first emerged in Wuhan, made the comments during a session at the Rhodes Policy Summit in London.
Speaking alongside his Oxford PhD tutor Sir John Bell, the scientist who served as experimental tsar for Boris Johnson, and former prime minister Tony Blair, Dr Gao said he was there ‘at the start’ of the outbreak.
Dr Gao, who withdrew from the CDC in July 2022, said he did not see anything ‘unusual’ until December 2019, a month before coronavirus was officially confirmed in the UK.
But Dr Gao, a foreign fellow at the US National Academy of Medicine and the US National Academy of Sciences, claimed there was “no evidence” of which animals the virus may have come from.
He said: ‘Until now, people think of some animal as the host or the repository.
In short, there is no animal evidence (of) the source of the virus.
Dr Gao also said at the conference: “Until now, people believe that some animals are the host or the reservoir. In short, there is no evidence of animals (from) the source of the virus.
The disputed findings were first reported in March by scientists who suggested that raccoon dogs – fox-like mammals – sold in a Wuhan market carried the coronavirus at the end of 2019.
Some of the researchers behind the report, including Dr. Christian Andersen and Dr. Robert Garry, are close associates of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who oversaw America’s research into pathogens when the pandemic hit.
The report directed some credence away from the hypothesis that Covid escaped from Biolab in Wuhan, a theory Chinese officials have rejected outright. But many experts have questioned the findings, saying that all they do is prove raccoon dogs are on the market.
Now, Dr. Gao, a former Chinese government official, argues that there is no evidence showing any animals, including raccoon dogs, may have first harbored the pandemic coronavirus before it infected humans.
The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic remain unknown, with criticism that China has thwarted efforts to learn more about the cause of the global pandemic that has killed at least 6.8 million people.
The Chinese government said it has always supported all efforts to investigate the source.
All hypotheses for the origins of COVID-19 remain on the table, the World Health Organization said, including that the virus is linked to a high-security laboratory for studying dangerous pathogens in Wuhan.
China denies any such link.
The World Health Organization also said that the evidence so far indicated that the virus came from animals, possibly bats.
In the March report, the animals were present just before the samples were collected — making them a potential vessel for transmission of the virus to humans.
The study’s authors said in March that their findings on genetic evidence of Covid near wildlife market stalls support their theory that wildlife harbored the virus before it eventually mutated in a way that made it infectious to humans.
The scientists did not make the raw data available with the preprint report, making it impossible for independent experts to fact-check their findings.
The study began when Dr. Florence Debard, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, came across genetic sequences that had been uploaded to a database by Chinese scientists.
The researchers downloaded the data, hoping to investigate it as part of their search for the origin of Covid.
However, it was stopped by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency Dr. Gao runs.
The researchers later learned that the data was uploaded on June 22, 2022, but has not been released to the public.
It was also used for a preprint report unveiled by Chinese scientists in February 2022
It was removed from the database on March 11. This research team has already downloaded it.
GISAID, based in Munich, Germany, accused the team of breaching the database’s terms of use by obtaining the data, they say in the report.
While the highly anticipated report made headlines, experts argued that discovering a genetic trace left behind by animals in the same place where virus samples were discovered is not a smoking gun.
Scientists said the findings fall short of providing conclusive evidence that Covid was passed from animals to humans in a second-hand event.
The study took swab samples from market carts that were found to contain more than 4,500 pieces of genetic material from raccoon dogs as well as genetic signatures of the coronavirus.
Their data also revealed Covid-positive samples from mammals such as the Malay porcupine, Amur hedgehog, hooded palm civet and bamboo rat.
But raccoon dogs accounted for more than 80 percent of the DNA and RNA detected.
The researchers located the stalls in the southwest corner of the market where Covid is spreading. They determined that a large portion of the Covid samples collected from the area were from raccoon dogs
“Once the initial fallout has occurred, the market most likely became a site of widespread human-to-human transmission,” the study authors said.
Raccoon dogs act as intermediate hosts for the virus – meaning they pick up pathogens from the wild and harbor them without getting sick.
There is a risk that they could transmit viruses to humans – or any other animal they come into contact with.
The research team claims that the Covid samples and those of raccoon dogs discovered in the same place is too strange to be a coincidence.
Proponents of the theory that Covid escaped from a high-security biolab in Wuhan studying coronaviruses, which was being portrayed as an xenophobic plot, were skeptical of the findings.
At the time, Dr. Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told DailyMail.com that The new research added “a little to the discussion” about the origin of Covid and necessitated “extreme caution”.
Reacting to Dr. Gao’s remarks on Friday, Dr. Ebright told DailyMail.com: ‘There is also no basis for believing that raccoon dogs played a role in (COVID) entry into humans.
In particular, there is no basis for believing that a raccoon dog contracted (Covid) before (Covid) entered humans. Highly publicized claims last month about evidence of raccoon dogs being propaganda, not science.
Last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that the bureau believes with “moderate confidence” in the lab leak theory. Other intelligence agencies are less certain.
Four agencies and the National Intelligence Council concluded with low confidence that Covid emerged from a natural spillover event.
Dr. Christian Andersen, a Danish biologist from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, was among the authors of the March report.
He rose to prominence in 2021 when emails between him and Dr. Anthony Fauci discussing how the virus was designed early in the pandemic were revealed.
Dr. Andersen was also the lead author of a February 2020 paper that some said was designed to quash the theory that Covid may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This paper, now infamous, was titled “Proximate Origin”.
Dr. Gary, a microbiologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, is also an author.
The microbiologist was also involved in discussions early in the pandemic about the possible synthetic nature of the virus and in a call with Dr. Andersen and Dr. Fauci where they allegedly discussed how to rule out a leak in the lab.
Dr. Jarry told DailyMail.com last month: “There is absolutely no laboratory leak scenario that is consistent with this data.
Time to seal up the coffin of all the conspiracy theories leaking in the lab and give this long dead corpse a proper burial.
DailyMail.com has also reached out to Dr. Andersen for comment.
