Where did COVID-19 come from? It's a question the U.S. has been attempting to answer for months, but federal investigators keep running into road blocks while trying to trace the coronavirus' origins.
President Joe Biden on May 26 issued a 90-day order for intelligence agencies to collect more information on how COVID-19 infections started spreading. Theories on the table included whether the virus originated in animals and then transferred to humans, or that the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus was first identified.
On Tuesday, the White House received an intelligence report but it offered little clues as to how the global pandemic began. In the end, investigators said they could not reach a solid conclusion because Chinese officials would not release certain information.
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"It was a deep dive, but you can only go so deep as the situation allows," a U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal. "If China's not going to give access to certain data sets, you're never really going to know."
The White House report is classified, though officials are seeking to release portions of it to the public within the next several days.
The World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the window of opportunity for solving the mystery is "closing fast."
"Any delay will render some of the studies biologically impossible," the WHO said in a commentary published in the journal Nature. "Antibodies wane, so collecting further samples and testing people who might have been exposed before December 2019 will yield diminishing returns."
Like with the U.S., the WHO said Chinese researchers are being less than forthcoming when it comes to providing access to scientific evidence.
"The Chinese team was and still is reluctant to share raw data... citing concerns over patient confidentiality," the commentary said.
China on Wednesday fired back at the U.S. and the WHO for placing blame on the country for stalling investigations. Fu Cong, a director-general in China's Foreign Ministry, told foreign journalists during a briefing that officials should "concentrate on other possible avenues that may help trace the origin" of COVID-19, suggesting that investigators should consider pursing studies in other countries.
"China has always supported and will continue to participate in the science-based origin tracing efforts," Fu said.
Back in March, investigators with the WHO concluded the most likely explanation was that the coronavirus spread from bats to another animal that then infected humans. At the time, researchers said the lab-leak theory was "extremely unlikely." However, the WHO found the laboratory origin hypothesis too important to ignore, so it was also included in the investigation. The March report provided little detail on the reasoning behind the researchers' conclusions and said more investigation was needed. The process, they explained, could last for months or years.
Since then, researchers haven't gotten any closer to answering the question. Discovering the origins of the virus is not only important to understanding how the COVID-19 outbreak began, but could help scientists prevent future pandemics. At this point, the mission is at a "critical juncture."
"We call on the scientific community and country leaders to join forces to expedite the phase 2 studies... while there is still time," the WHO said in their commentary.
Some priorities that should be looked at as soon as possible in future research, according to the WHO, include antibody surveys and trace-back studies in regions where the virus may have been spreading undetected, assessing wild bats and other farm-raised animals in China and beyond that may have acted as potential reservoirs or intermediate hosts, and making a detailed risk-factor analysis of earlier cases for an assessment of all possible exposures.
Researchers point out that confirming the origin of the coronavirus with 100% certainty may never be possible.
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