Residents in Wuhan line up to be tested for Covid-19. Photo / AP
Residents in Wuhan line up to be tested for Covid-19. Photo / AP
The true origins of Covid may never be revealed, the Chinese official who was in charge of the country’s pandemic response has said.
Dr George Fu Gao, who is thought to know more about the origins of the disease than any other scientist, has told the Telegraph he is “not optimistic” the origin of the virus will ever be known, citing both political and scientific obstacles.
“It’s too sensitive; too politicised,” he said.
Oxford-educated Goa flew from China to speak at Rhodes Policy Summit on pandemic preparedness in London on Friday, together with his former PhD tutor Sir John Bell and Tony Blair, the former prime minister.
Gao led the Chinese Center for Disease Control when Covid first emerged in late 2019, and it is the first time he has visited Britain since the pandemic.
He told the conference he was there “at the very beginning” and had not seen “anything unusual until the end of December [2019]” when respiratory cases started to fill hospital wards in Wuhan.
On the origins of the virus, he carefully added: “Long story short, there is no evidence which animals... the virus comes [from]”.
The comment - perhaps carefully crafted - can be read in a number of different ways.
Gao later told the Telegraph that the subject of the pandemic’s origins had become too sensitive and political to discuss at length.
“The whole area is too sensitive. There is too much politicisation. We must focus on science”, he said.
On the science, Gao added that the theory that there was an intermediate animal species between bats and humans that provided a “reservoir” of the virus might be wrong.
“I too thought there must be an intermediate host - a reservoir - but now I’m not so sure. It’s possible there is no animal reservoir,” he said.
“With Sars, it was found once in civets but not again. It could be the same [with Covid]. It could be it happens once in a few animals, a small group, a few cages”.
Sars emerged in China in 2002/3 and spread across Southeast Asia, killing at least 783 people.
The virus was later traced back to bats, which are thought to have infected masked palm civets, which in turn infected humans.
Some 10,000 civets were killed in Guangdong Province by the Chinese authorities in the wake of the epidemic as they were regarded as a “potential infectious source”.
Gao, who appeared good-humoured and gregarious, has a political tightrope to walk at home and is almost certain to know more about Covid’s origins than he lets on.
No doubt aware that China had officially apologised for its slowness in dealing with the 2002/3 SARS epidemic, he was careful to claim the country had acted promptly on SARS-Cov-2.
China’s CDC had been the first to detect, isolate and share the genetic sequence of the virus, he told the London conference.
Gao continues to make waves as a scientist. It was newly published genetic sequences gathered by him and his CDC team that sparked the most recent bout of controversy over the origins of the virus.
The data - which the World Health Organisation says should have been published three years ago - revealed that genetic material from raccoon dogs and other animals was present in Covid positive samples collected at the market in January 2020.
The Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, where a number of people related to the market fell ill with a virus, sits closed in Wuhan, China, in 2020. Photo / AP
Gao and his team say in the supporting paper published two weeks ago in Nature that the data provides “convincing evidence” that Sars-Cov-2 was spreading widely at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market in January 2020.
But they add it is not clear how Covid got there, arguing that, while it could have been from an animal, it could also have been “introduced by a human or cold chain product” – a route consistently mooted by state propaganda in China.
Although Gao would not be drawn, there is almost certainly more valuable genetic material available to the Chinese authorities which could yet see the light of day.
For instance, a joint China-Oxford collaboration into tick-borne diseases in the years preceding the pandemic, took blood samples from wild animals, including racoon dogs, being sold at the Huanan seafood market right up until December 2019.
The Western researchers involved in the study are clear that the samples were properly taken and collected but have been unable to establish their fate.
It is possible they have been destroyed but it is also possible they are still in the process of being analysed by the Chinese authorities, say experts.
