Virus research in China before the pandemic

sir – Sarah Knapton’s report (“Scientists dismissed Covid lab leak theory ‘as they feared ban on high-risk experiments’”, March 10) refers to claims made in a letter to the Financial

Times by Professor Anton van der Merwe of the University of Oxford.

For the record, my organisation, Ecohealth Alliance, collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on research – funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – into Sars-related coronaviruses in China. While Professor van der Merwe has the right to his own opinions, he cannot construct his own facts.

First, he implied that genetically modifying an animal virus to infect human cells (or “humanised” mice) is de facto a “gain-of-function” experiment. This is incorrect. Such experiments fall under the US HHS P3CO regulations, which define gain-of-function research as likely to create new viral strains with “enhanced transmissibility or virulence” for viruses that are already “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations”, and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans”. The Sars-related research that Ecohealth Alliance carried out only dealt with bat coronaviruses that had never been shown to infect people, let alone cause morbidity and/or mortality in humans, and therefore was not gain-of-function research. This was confirmed by the NIH in a letter to us in 2016.

Secondly, Professor van der Merwe stated that these experiments “were being performed in Wuhan on Sars-cov-2 like viruses”. This is incorrect. Experiments involved bat coronaviruses related to the original Sars-cov, not Sars-cov-2, and there is no evidence that any lab in the world had a virus genetically close enough to Sars-cov-2 that it could have been manipulated to become that virus.

Professor van der Merwe also doubts that identifying potentially dangerous organisms in the wild could prevent pandemics. A One Health strategy for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response begins with smart surveillance to identify potential pathways of transmission and take actions to control the risks of zoonotic spillover. Surely those risks justify undertaking the kind of research that was supported by the NIH in China before the pandemic.

Dr Peter Daszak President, Ecohealth Alliance New York, United States