Laboratories and Scientific Equipment

A group of 18 scientists stated Thursday in a letter published in the journal Science that there is not enough evidence to decide whether a natural origin or an accidental laboratory leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

They argued, as the U.S. government and other countries have, for a new investigation to explore where the virus came from.

The organizers of the letter, Jesse Bloom, who studies the evolution of viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, said they strove to articulate a wait-and-see viewpoint that they believe is shared by many scientists. Many of the signers have not spoken out before.

“Most of the discussion you hear about SARS-CoV-2 origins at this point is coming from, I think, the relatively small number of people who feel very certain about their views,” Dr. Bloom said.

issued a report claiming that such a leak was extremely unlikely, even though the mission never investigated any Chinese labs. The team did visit the Wuhan lab, but did not investigate it. A lab investigation was never part of their mandate. The report, produced in a mission with Chinese scientists, drew extensive criticism from the U.S. government and others that the Chinese government had not cooperated fully and had limited the international scientists’ access to information.

The new letter argued for a new and more rigorous investigation of virus origins that would involve a broader range of experts and safeguard against conflicts of interest.

Recent letters by another group of scientists and international affairs experts argued at length for the relative likelihood of a laboratory leak. Previous statements from other scientists and the W.H.O. report both asserted that a natural origin was by far the most plausible.

Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, said he signed the new letter because “the recent W.H.O. report on the origins of the virus, and its discussion, spurred several of us to get in touch with each other and talk about our shared desire for dispassionate investigation of the origins of the virus.”

“I certainly respect the opinion of others who may disagree with what we’ve said in the letter, but I felt I had no choice but to put my concerns out there,” he said.

Another signer, Sarah E. Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, said, “I think it is more likely than not that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from an animal reservoir rather than a lab.”

But “lab accidents do happen and can have disastrous consequences,” she added. “I am concerned about the short- and long-term consequences of failing to evaluate the possibility of laboratory escape in a rigorous way. It would be a troublesome precedent.”

The list of signers includes researchers with deep knowledge of the SARS family of viruses, such as Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had collaborated with the Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli in research done at the university on the original SARS virus. Dr. Baric did not respond to attempts to reach him by email and telephone.

“We in the laboratory are preparing for another big boom in testing,” said Dr. Baird, whose team has run more than two million coronavirus tests since the beginning of the pandemic. “Even if people are vaccinated, they’re going to wonder, ‘Am I the breakthrough case?’”

In addition to Cepheid, other companies have developed tests that look for influenza and the coronavirus at the same time, including Roche, which has received emergency use authorization for a test that looks for the coronavirus, influenza A and influenza B at once.

In recent years various hospitals have developed in-house versions of these combination tests as well, some of which look for more than a dozen different respiratory pathogens simultaneously using P.C.R. technology. Those “multiplex” tests are especially helpful in diagnosing illnesses in people with weak immune systems because they allow doctors to swiftly discern what pathogen is making a person sick before it is too late to start the right treatments.

A French company, bioMérieux, sells a P.C.R. test that looks for the coronavirus as well as 21 other viruses and bacteria simultaneously. And Roche recently bought a company that sells a machine that can screen for more than 20 pathogens in one go.

Testing for multiple pathogens does not always lead to a simple treatment, however. Co-infections, in which a person is infected with multiple viruses simultaneously, are more common than doctors expected, and sometimes the multiplex tests might detect a viral infection but miss a bacterial one, said Dr. Daniel Griffin, chief of infectious diseases at ProHealth New York. A patient could carry the influenza virus but also test positive for a bacterium such as pneumococcus, for example.

“We initially thought that every time we identified a virus, we would just be able stop all antibiotics and just treat the virus if effective antiviral therapy was available,” Dr. Griffin said. “We now know that we often need to continue antibiotics,” he explained, because sometimes the multiplex tests are not sensitive enough to rule out a bacterial culprit.

Doctors and test developers are still grappling with how many pathogens to test patients for in different settings. “A burning question at every company is what panel is best — is it one, two, four, 20?” said Dr. Mark Miller, chief medical officer at bioMérieux. Relatively young and healthy adults might just need a quad test to know if they should start on Tamiflu for influenza, for example, but patients with underlying chronic diseases who are very sick might benefit from receiving the test for 22 different pathogens so that doctors can decide whether they need to be admitted to a hospital.

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The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a CNN clip on Friday that he favored a theory, decried by many scientists and rejected as “extremely unlikely” by at least one World Health Organization international expert, that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. The former official, Dr. Robert Redfield, offered no evidence and emphasized that it was his opinion.

“I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, escaped. The other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out,” Dr. Redfield told Dr. Sanjay Gupta in the video clip, referring to the origin of the virus. A formal report from the W.H.O. team and the Chinese scientists it worked with, on the origins of the pandemic and on the coronavirus in humans, is expected next week.

Despite Dr. Redfield’s comments, officials briefed on the intelligence say there is no new evidence that would cause American spy agencies to reassess their views. There is no new information that bolsters the so-called lab theory, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.

During the Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and to a lesser extent the president himself, pushed the theory that the coronavirus had escaped from a lab.

the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration concurred “with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”

Although that statement was diplomatically worded, the message from the intelligence agencies was clear that, despite pressure from the Trump administration, they had no evidence that the coronavirus had escaped from the lab. And many intelligence officials remained far more skeptical than Mr. Pompeo, telling colleagues there was simply not enough information to say where the coronavirus came from, and certainly not enough to challenge the scientific consensus that was skeptical of the lab theory.

The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies have been skeptical that China was sharing all that it knew about the virus, although that was at least in part because of local officials withholding critical information from Beijing at key moments at the beginning of the outbreak.

wrote an open letter in early March when the W.H.O. team report was first anticipated demanding a thorough investigation of Chinese labs. Virologists who have studied the evolution of coronaviruses and the way they have jumped to humans in the past causing SARS and MERS continue to argue that the evidence for a natural origin apart from a lab leak is overwhelming.

The Chinese government, prominent Chinese scientists and many virologists, who study the evolution of viruses and the appearance of infectious diseases, have said the lab leak theory was very unlikely, citing genetic evidence and the many opportunities for natural infection in human interactions with animals like bats, where the virus is believed to have originated.

When Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States’ top infectious disease expert, was asked at a White House news conference on the pandemic on Friday about Dr. Redfield’s comments, he noted that the remarks were only an opinion. Dr. Fauci said that there are different ways viruses could become adapted to humans.

“You know one of them is in the lab and one of them, which is the more likely, which most public health officials agree with, is that it likely was below the radar screen, spreading in the community in China for several weeks if not a month or more, which allowed it, when it first got recognized clinically to be pretty well adapted,” Dr. Fauci said.

At the same news conference on Friday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the current director of the C.D.C., said she was looking forward to reviewing the upcoming joint report from the W.H.O. experts and Chinese scientists.

“I don’t have any indication for or against either of the hypotheses that Dr. Fauci just outlined,” she said.

Zachary Montague and Isabella Grullón Paz contributed reporting.

Asked to respond to the letter, Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the W.H.O., replied in an email that the team of experts that had gone to China “is working on its full report as well as an accompanying summary report, which we understand will be issued simultaneously in a couple of weeks.”

The open letter noted that the W.H.O.’s study was a joint effort by a team of outside experts, selected by the global health organization, who worked along with Chinese scientists, and that the team’s report must be agreed on by all. The letter emphasized that the team was denied access to some records and did not investigate laboratories in China.

Findings by the team, the letter stated, “while potentially useful to a limited extent, represent neither the official position of the W.H.O. nor the result of an unrestricted, independent investigation.”

Without naming him, the letter criticized Peter Daszak, an expert in animal diseases and their connection to human health, who is the head of EcoHealth Alliance. The letter linked to articles about Dr. Daszak and said he had previously stated his conviction that a natural origin of the virus was most likely.

Dr. Daszak said the letter’s push to investigate a lab origin for the virus was a position “supported by political agendas.”

“I strongly urge the global community to wait for the publication of the report from the W. H.O. mission,” he added.

Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security, at King’s College London, and one of the signers of the letter, said, “I think in order to get a credible investigation, it has to be more of a global effort in the sense that it should be taken to the U.N. General Assembly where all the nations of the world are represented and can vote on whether or not to give a mandate to the U.N. secretary general, to carry out this kind of investigation.”

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Laboratories and Scientific Equipment

More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry Into Coronavirus Origins