Dödligt virus från Kina orsakar panik (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19)

US President Donald Trump has fuelled suggestions that the virus might have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, where the outbreak started. There is no evidence for that claim.

Researchers’ first started looking at the virus’s genome to see whether they could match it to pathogens found in other animals. In late January, a few weeks after researchers sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted online the entire sequence of a coronavirus that had been stored in their lab since being discovered in intermediate horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus affinis) in Yunnan province in 2013. That genome, named RATG13, was 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2, making it the closest known relative and strongly suggesting the new virus originated in bats.

The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and*analysed genomes*of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),
*and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens. This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.

In April 2020, we witnessed firsthand how misinformation about the virus’ origins can destroy research when President Trump ordered the National Institutes of Health to strip the EcoHealth Alliance of a grant that involved close collaboration with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The NIH justified the cancellation by saying the research, which investigated bat SARS-like coronaviruses circulating in China and zoonotic spillover, did not align with NIH priorities, which strains credulity. This work produced some of the strongest corroborating evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally emergent pathogen, as serological surveys demonstrated that people living in close proximity to colonies of bats had antibodies to bat SARS-like coronaviruses. The NIH has since set impossible conditions for restoring the grant, ensuring that this research will never resume. This set a chilling precedent by imposing a tremendous and unnecessary setback on the efforts to understand SARS-CoV-2, eroding trust in scientists and disrupting productive international collaborations that are essential both in this pandemic and to global health security over the longer term.