MANY questions still linger around the very start of the Covid-19 pandemic, including where the virus came from in the first place (wildlife reservoir or lab leak) and whether the Chinese government’s strategy around the virus allowed it to spread to the rest of the world. Global health expert, Professor Devi Sridhar tackles some of these issues in her new book, Preventable.

Burning question number one. Does she take the Wuhan leak theory seriously?

Yes, in her new book Preventable, she writes that given all the information at time of writing, “The lab leak hypothesis seems to be as likely an explanation as natural spillover and should be pursued until evidence emerges to the contrary.”

If a leak were the cause, how does she think it may have happened?

Sridhar writes: “My view is that this was unlikely to be an intentional leak or a man-made virus but rather someone working at the lab becoming infected with SARS-Co-V-2 during the course of their job, and then going on to infect others in the community. It just seems a remarkable coincidence that a new coronavirus would emerge within kilometres of one of the only Level 4 research labs working on coronaviruses in the world. Moreover, no exact matches of SARS-Co-V-2 have been found in any intermediary animals like civet cats or pangolins, indicating a natural host reservoir.”

READ: Full exclusive Herald interview with Devi Sridhar here

Has evidence been produced since she wrote Preventable to dismiss the leak hypothesis?

Not definitively. Though a recent study by Worobey, Andersen, Garry et al said that it had found “dispositive evidence” that SARS-CoV-2 originated from the Huanan market, other scientists argue that the evidence was not that strong.

An in-depth article in Vanity Fair analyses the drive to towards a conclusion of jump from wildlife over leak, and notes that, China’s CDC published a report that contained new data and pointed to a different conclusion. “It revealed that, of the 457 swabs taken from 18 species of animals in the market, none contained any evidence of the virus. Rather, the virus was found in 73 swabs taken from around the market’s environment, all linked to human infections. Thus, while the samples proved the market served as an “amplifier” of viral spread, they did not prove the market was the source.”

What else does Sridhar say about China’s role in the pandemic?

In an interview with The Herald, she described how time was lost with China’s delaying notifying the world, and arguably covering up what was happening in Wuhan. “We lost weeks there,” she said. “Then we saw the spread in other countries and the widespread seeding.” She also notes in Preventable, that while the Chinese government put cities in Hubei into lockdown, it did not “apply this same principle of controlling the movement of people to outward flights from Wuhan to the rest of the world.”

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