Dr Dominic Dwyer, Australia’s member of the WHO-convened Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2, won’t remember me, but he was generous and helpful when I interviewed him as a PhD student in the early 1990s.
His more recent comments to the media illustrate the challenges of attempting to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2 as part of a WHO-convened expert team (more of which below).
This post briefly reviews two current Covid-19 review processes, as well as recent media reports about the WHO-convened Covid origins study.
Covid-19 reviews
At the World Health Assembly on 19 May 2020, the Assembly adopted resolution WHA73.1 on the Covid-19 response that, amongst many other things, requested the Director-General to carry out a review on “lessons learned from the WHO-coordinated international health response to COVID-19”, including the functioning of the International Health Regulations and “the actions of WHO and their timelines pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic” (para 10).
Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response
On 9 July 2020, the WHO Director-General announced the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR) to “evaluate the world’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic”.
This Panel is co-chaired by the Rt. Hon. Helen Clarke, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand who more recently was Administrator of the UN Development Programme, and Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former President of Liberia.
The work of the Independent Panel is ongoing. However, its second progress report is available.
The Panel points out that 12 previous expert commissions have reviewed the operation of the International Health Regulations between 2011 and the outbreak of the coronavirus.
The Panel notes with deep concern that the “failure to enact fundamental changes despite the warnings issued has left the world dangerously exposed, as the Covid-19 pandemic proves” (p 14).
Other key messages from the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness & Response:
- Non-pharmaceutical public health response measures (such as social distancing, hand hygiene and wearing masks) will need to continue to be implemented at scale globally, irrespective of whether a vaccine is rolled out.
- The Covid pandemic has worsened global health inequalities. [A reflection of those inequalities is seen in the fact that as of September 2020, wealthy countries – representing 13% of global population – had pre-purchased 51% of promised doses of vaccine candidates. South Africa and India, supported by a group of other developing countries, have sought a waiver of patent (and other protection) under the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), but have encountered resistance from the European Union and others.]
- The global pandemic alert system is not working and needs to come into the digital era, enabling preventive actions to be taken within days, rather than weeks. The process for declaring a public health emergency of international concern is not working.
- The IHR lack teeth, and the incentives are too weak to ensure compliance. The Panel put this conclusion in more modest language: “The incentives for cooperation are too weak to ensure the effective engagement of States with the international system in a disciplined, transparent, accountable and timely manner” (p 7).
Review Committee on the Functioning of the International Health Regulation
On 8 September 2020, also in response to resolution WHA73.1, the Director-General convened a Review Committee on the Functioning of the IHR during the Covid-19 response.
This Committee’s mandate is directed towards how well the IHRs performed during the Covid-19 response, the status of recommendations of previous reviews, and the need for amendments to the IHR.
Its interim progress report is available here.
The Committee pointed to the lack of a robust accountability mechanism to monitor and incentivise compliance with the IHR, beyond the requirement for States Parties’ and the Director-General to report to the World Health Assembly on the implementation of the Regulations (Art. 54). A “robust system of compliance evaluation built into the Regulations” was proposed as one possible approach.
Recommendations to strengthen the IHR have been circulating for years. See here and here for short, helpful, reviews.
The Committee noted that “A peer-review mechanism, based on the Universal Periodic Review used by the Human Rights Council,” could be a useful way of strengthening countries’ levels of preparedness and response, and compliance with their legal obligations (para 18).
China’s reporting of the initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has been widely discussed. The cluster of cases from the Huanan market was reported to the WHO China country office on 31 December 2019, and the market was closed on 1 January 2020.
The interim report states that WHO requested verification of the initial reports on 1 January, receiving a response from the China Focal Point on 3 January.
Under the IHR, States Parties are supposed to reply to WHO requests for verification or further information within 24 hours (IHR, Art. 10), but the report notes that delay beyond 24 hours is not unusual.
The Committee stated that the timelines for country response are not realistic, given that social media can result in information reaching the public domain before a comprehensive risk assessment is completed. It also noted that “countries may be reluctant to report on events if they perceive consequences, mainly related to travel and trade, deriving from early notification.”
On 9 January 2020, WHO did not recommend any specific measures for travellers, and advised against any travel or trade restrictions on China.
A day later, China media reported the first death from Covid-19, and three days later, the first case was reported outside Chinese territory.
On 29 February 2020, updated WHO recommendations for international traffic in relation to Covid-19 stated: “WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing Covid-19 outbreaks”.
Australia began to impose travel restrictions in response to Covid-19 on 1 February 2020. Initially, the ban prevented foreign nationals (excluding permanent Australian residents) who had been in mainland China from entering Australia for “14 days from the time they left or transited through mainland China“.
On 20 March 2020, Australia closed its borders completely to non-citizens and non-residents. They have remained closed since then.
Travel restrictions have since become a staple for national responses to Covid-19 spread, although some scholars argue they breach the IHRs; see discussion here and here.
But no one is listening, then or now. In his annual report to the World Health Assembly on the functioning of the International Health Regulations, the Director-General stated that as at 28 March 2020, 136 countries had reported to WHO under Article 43 about “additional health measures that significantly interfered with international traffic and provided their public health rationale”.
In an ideal world, perhaps borders could remain open and watertight screening, contact tracing and isolation measures could effectively prevent spread. But it’s a brave country that completely trusts its own implementation of these important public health controls: SARS-CoV-2 is devilishly infectious, and aerosol transmission can occur even when normal hotel quarantine and infection controls are in place.
Public health experts regard Australia’s travel bans as an important and necessary part of Australia’s successful response. For example, Duckett and Stobart regard “Australia’s decision to close its borders to all foreigners on 20 March to ‘align international travel restrictions with risks’” as a “turning point” in Australia’s response.
In her evidence to the Senate Select Committee Inquiry into Australia’s Response to Covid-19, Professor Raina MacIntyre, who leads the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales, described travel bans (border closures) as “the single most important measure” (para 2.43), a conclusion supported by this modelling study. Unfortunate – certainly, but necessary to avoid importing new cases.
WHO-convened Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2
In late January, an international team of virologists travelled to Wuhan on a fact-finding mission as part of a WHO-convened global study into the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The findings of this mission were discussed in a press conference on 9 February. Dr Peter Ben Embarek, the chair of the investigation team, said that it was extremely unlikely that the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.
Dr Dwyer shares this assessment. His account of the Wuhan visit, refreshingly devoid of geo-political posturing, illustrates just how much remains unknown.
One giant limitation of the WHO-convened Wuhan study tour was the fact it took place a whole year after the initial outbreak.
Australia’s original call for an independent investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 greatly displeased China.
However, when you consider the scale of the death and economic harm caused by Covid-19, it is simply breath-taking that such an outbreak should go unexamined. Not surprisingly several inquiries are now proceeding.
Investigating the origins of SARS-Cov-2 was and is unavoidably sensitive, not only because it involves asking where the virus may have originated, and the conditions that facilitated its spread into the human population, but because the likely time period during which the first-observed cases arose goes to China’s level of compliance with the IHR, and the impact this may have had on the international spread of SARS-CoV-2.
The controversy surrounding the WHO-convened study has escalated since the international team left Wuhan.
Dr Dwyer noted that the visiting scientists were given access to aggregated data and summaries of medical records (of the tens of thousands of patients in Wuhan with influenza-like illnesses in months prior to December 2019), rather than access to the raw data.
Dr Dwyer also told the ABC that the expert team’s request to test stored samples of blood donations made in Wuhan around December 2019 was denied, apparently for legal reasons, although it might have given a picture of SARS-CoV-2 levels in the wider community at that time.
Requests to test wastewater samples from Wuhan in December 2019 was also not possible because all samples had been discarded. (Many people with Covid-19 have gastrointestinal infection as well as respiratory infection, making wastewater sampling a form of sentinel surveillance for community cases).
These sources of information might have given a clearer picture of whether and how much virus was circulating in the community prior to December 2019.
“We also know the Chinese were reporting the people who went to hospital were really sick,” Dr Dwyer said. “But we now know there’s a lot of ordinary transmission going on between otherwise healthy people, so there must’ve been many, many more cases in December than were identified.”
However, Dwyer regards the Huanan market as “more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero. We need to look elsewhere for the viral origins”.
On 4 March, 26 international experts in virology, zoology and microbiology, called for a new inquiry, stating that it was “all but impossible” for the WHO-convened researchers to adequately investigate the origins of the outbreak.
The scientists wrote that “We have…reached the conclusion that the joint team did not have the mandate, the independence, or the necessary accesses to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation into all the relevant SARS-CoV-2 origin hypotheses – whether natural spillover or laboratory/research-related incident”.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that WHO has decided to scrap publication of the interim report of the WHO-convened international team. The full report is expected “in coming weeks”.
Sydney Health Law 
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