The Associated Press published a lengthy story yesterday looking at the long history of China lying about the origins of COVID-19. Some of this will be familiar territory for people who followed this story closely but other aspects were new to me (and also to the WHO), including the possibility that China inspected the Wuhan wet market on Christmas day 2019, nearly a week before the Dec. 31, 2019 visit already known to the world.

WHO officials heard of an earlier inspection of the market on Dec. 25, 2019, according to a recording of a confidential WHO meeting provided to AP by an attendee. Such a probe has never been mentioned publicly by either Chinese authorities or WHO.

In the recording, WHO’s top animal virus expert, Peter Ben Embarek, mentioned the earlier date, describing it as “an interesting detail.” He told colleagues that officials were “looking at what was on sale in the market, whether all the vendors have licenses (and) if there was any illegal (wildlife) trade happening in the market.”

A colleague asked Ben Embarek, who is no longer with WHO, if that seemed unusual. He responded that “it was not routine,” and that the Chinese “must have had some reason” to investigate the market. “We’ll try to figure out what happened and why they did that.”...

A scientist in China when the outbreak occurred said they heard of a Dec. 25 inspection from collaborating virologists in the country. They declined to be named out of fear of retribution.

WHO said in an email that it was “not aware” of the Dec. 25 investigation. It is not included in the U.N. health agency’s official COVID-19 timeline.

Researchers from China's CDC arrived to take samples on Jan. 1 but by that point the market had already been shut down and the whole place was being cleaned.

So what does this Dec. 25 investigation prove? If there were any samples taken that day, China has never admitted it. The AP reports that one day earlier a sample taken from a sick vendor at the market had been sent out for sequencing. So this could indicates local authorities were already zeroing in on the market as a possible source of the disease earlier that believed. And that might argue for the kind of natural spillover event many scientists have argued is a likely explanation.

Last month the Atlantic published the results of some new research which claims to have found raccoon dog DNA in some samples.

Now, an international team of virologists, genomicists, and evolutionary biologists may have finally found crucial data to help fill that knowledge gap. A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. It’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses...

The genetic sequences were pulled out of swabs taken in and near market stalls around the pandemic’s start. They represent the first bits of raw data that researchers outside of China’s academic institutions and their direct collaborators have had access to. A few weeks ago, the data appeared on an open-access genomic database called GISAID, after being quietly posted by researchers affiliated with the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. By almost pure happenstance, scientists in Europe, North America, and Australia spotted the sequences, downloaded them, and began an analysis.

The research was led by Kristian Andersen, one of the scientists who was pulled in by Dr. Fauci to write the natural origins paper. Andersen initially suspected the virus was the result of a lab leak but seemed to change his mind almost overnight and contributed to a paper downplaying that as a possibility. There's also a question about how this data mysteriously appeared (and then quickly disappeared) years after the data was collected.

At this point, it’s still unclear why the sequences were so recently posted to GISAID. They also vanished from the database shortly after the international team of researchers notified the Chinese researchers of their preliminary findings, without explanation. When I emailed George Gao, the former China CDC director-general and the lead author on the original Chinese analysis, asking for his team’s rationale, I didn’t immediately receive a response—though he later told Jon Cohen at Science magazine that this latest analysis represent “nothing new.” Given what was in the GISAID data, it does seem that raccoon dogs could have been introduced into and clarified the origins narrative far sooner—at least a year ago, and likely more. On Friday, at a press briefing, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, addressed the disappearing data, as well as the extreme lag with which it was posted to GISAID in the first place. “These data could have and should have been shared three years ago,” he told reporters. “We continue to call on China to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations to share the results.”

But there was also new information out last month which pointed in the other direction, toward the possibility of a lab leak.

In 2022 three biologists, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, guessed that if SARS-CoV-2 had been generated in a lab by a standard method, it would have been assembled from six sections of lab-synthesized DNA with the help of a biological agent called BsmBI. On analyzing the virus’s structure, they found evidence for the seams between sections and other distinctive marks of the assembly process.

Their paper was derided as “kindergarten molecular biology” by the virologists who are favorites of the mainstream press for their opposition to the lab-leak hypothesis. But a batch of documents reveal new details about the DEFUSE proposal and confirm that the three authors were on target. Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Interior Department, having noticed that a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey was a member of the DEFUSE team.

The new documents, which are background planning papers and drafts for the DEFUSE proposal, call for assembling SARS-like viruses from six sections of DNA, and include a cost estimate for purchase of the BsmBI restriction enzyme—exactly as the three authors had inferred. This clearly strengthens, perhaps conclusively, their contention that the virus is synthetic. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, says it raises “to the level of a smoking gun” the genetic evidence that the virus was manufactured.

The only thing people on either side of this argument agree on is that China has not been forthcoming with what it knows.

Scientists were sidelined and politicians took control. China refused a visa for Ben Embarek, then WHO’s top animal virus expert. The itinerary dropped nearly all items linked to an origins search, according to draft agendas for the trip obtained by the AP. And Gao, the then-head of the China CDC who is also a respected scientist tasked with investigating the origins, was left off the schedule.

Instead, Liang Wannian, a politician in the Communist Party hierarchy, took charge of the international delegation. Liang is an epidemiologist close to top Chinese officials and China’s Foreign Ministry who is widely seen as pushing the party line, not science-backed policies, according to nine people familiar with the situation who declined to be identified to speak on a sensitive subject.

Liang ruled in favor of shutting the Wuhan market at the beginning of the outbreak, according to a Chinese media interview with a top China CDC official that was later deleted. Significantly, it was Liang who promoted an implausible theory that the virus came from contaminated frozen food imported into China. Liang did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Early on, China went into cover-up mode and except for the occasional leak of information, nothing has changed in the four years since.