WASHINGTON – Scientists debated the origins of COVID-19 on Tuesday, disagreeing over whether the majority of available evidence points to natural transmission from a wild animal or to a virus developed in a laboratory and then released through an accidental leak.
The hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was part of an ongoing effort by Congress to apply lessons learned during the pandemic to prevent or mitigate the next outbreak.
Gregory Koblentz, associate professor and director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University in Virginia, said during the two-hour hearing The scientific community continues to debate its origins.
“The possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was intentionally developed as a biological weapon is unanimously rejected by all U.S. intelligence agencies,” Koblentz said. “While the intelligence community is divided on the origin of the pandemic, most agencies have concluded that the virus was not genetically engineered.”
Residents in Wuhan, China, were first diagnosed with an “atypical pneumonia-like illness” in December 2019, according to a COVID-19 Timeline from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
All of the early cases at the time appeared to be linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, but since then there has been much speculation about the type of research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Koblentz said he believes the available evidence points to spillage by an animal, but added that “a research accident cannot be ruled out at this time.”
The Chinese government’s lack of transparency and data has significantly hampered scientists’ efforts to reach a consensus on the origin of COVID-19, he said.
Scientists argue about laboratory vs. spillover
Richard Ebright, a board professor of chemistry and chemical biology and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, testified that in his opinion, “the preponderance of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was transmitted to humans through a research incident.”
Ebright also criticized his fellow panelist Robert Garry, who together with a handful of co-authors published an opinion article in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020 entitled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
In their commentary, Garry and the other scientists wrote: “We do not believe that any laboratory-generated scenario is plausible.”
Ebright said during Tuesday’s hearing that the opinion article represented “scientific misconduct and even fraud,” a characterization Garry rejected during the hearing.
“The authors expressed their opinion, but that opinion was not well-founded,” Ebright said. “In March 2020, there was no basis to call this a conclusion, as opposed to it being merely a hypothesis.”
Garry, a professor and associate dean of the medical school at Tulane University in Louisiana, argued for spillover during the hearing, testifying that the virus probably did not pass directly from a bat to humans, but to an unidentified intermediate animal.
“The bat coronaviruses are viruses that are transmitted through the gastrointestinal tract,” Garry said. “For a virus like this to evolve into a respiratory virus, there are simply too many mutations and changes required for a bat virus to jump directly to humans. In nature, that could really only happen by replication through an intermediate animal.”
Garry also defended gain-of-function research during the hearing, arguing that it has had some positive effects but noting that it requires “appropriate safeguards and restrictions.”
Lawmakers and experts have used several, often evolving, definitions for gain-of-function research in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Society for Microbiology Are defined These are techniques “used in research to change the function of an organism so that it can do more than before.”
If research on highly contagious and pathogenic viruses is “conducted responsibly,” it can lead to advances in public health and national security, Garry said.
“Without gain-of-function research, we wouldn’t have Tamiflu. Without gain-of-function research, we wouldn’t have a vaccine to prevent cancer caused by human papillomavirus infection,” Garry said. “And without gain-of-function research, we won’t be able to figure out how new viruses infect us. And if we don’t know how they infect us, we won’t be able to develop appropriate treatments and cures for the next potentially pandemic-causing virus.”
Supervision of funding, research
New Hampshire Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan has raised several questions about whether there is sufficient control over how the United States spends research funds and what mechanisms are in place to monitor how private companies conduct certain types of research.
“Although their research has the potential to cure diseases and boost our economy, unless they accept government funding, there is very little government oversight to ensure that private labs are conducting safe and ethical research,” she said.
Koblentz of George Mason University said that biosecurity controls are much less stringent in private research institutions that do not receive government funding.
“In order to extend the scope of control to all privately funded research, [it] would require legislative action,” said Koblentz.
He called on Congress to establish a national biorisk management agency that would have authority over biosafety and bioprotection “regardless of the funding source.”
“Ultimately, it shouldn’t matter where the funding comes from when it comes to making sure this research is done safely and responsibly,” Koblentz said.
Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee’s ranking member, said the panel will soon hold a hearing specifically on gain-of-function research, including what steps Congress should take to ensure the public is not put at risk.
The next pandemic
Committee Chairman Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, said during the hearing that lawmakers “must learn from the challenges of this pandemic to ensure we can better protect Americans from potential biological incidents in the future.”
“Our government needs the flexibility to identify the origins of natural outbreaks as well as potential outbreaks that could arise from errors or malicious intent,” Peters said.
Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney, after listening to part of the debate, expressed his anger that so much attention is being focused on the causes of the last pandemic and not on how to prepare for the next one.
“Given that it could have been either, we know what measures we need to take to protect ourselves from either,” Romney said. “And why there’s so much excitement about it makes me think it’s more political than scientific, but maybe I’m wrong.”
The United States, he said, should not fund gain-of-function research and “insist” that anyone receiving federal funding meet International Organization for Standardization standards.
