946 4 MARCH 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6584 science.org SCIENCENEWS | IN DEPTH
tive emboldened FBI agents to target anyone
with ties to China rather than following the
traditional practice of gathering evidence of
wrongdoing before pursuing a full-blown in-
vestigation. “If your boss calls it the China
Initiative, then you focus on anyone with
connections to China,” German says.
That strategy backfired in the prosecu-
tion of Anming Hu, a mechanical engineer-
ing professor at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, who was acquitted in September
2021 in a trial in which FBI agents admitted
they had found no evidence of economic es-
pionage. German hopes FBI will now put a
priority on cases where it suspects espionage
or the theft of intellectual property. Pei sug-
gests using a simple metric for determining
whether DOJ is following through on its re-
forms: “Fewer knocks on the doors of aca-
demic scientists by FBI agents.”
But Margaret Lewis, a China scholar and
law professor at Seton Hall University, wor-
ries the new policy may do little to protect
valuable collaborations with China given
the abundant “anti-China rhetoric in Wash-
ington.” She notes that both the Senate and
the House of Representatives have voted to
prohibit any scientist supported by China’s
foreign talents programs from receiving
federal research dollars—a consensus that
makes the ban likely to be included in a mas-
sive pending bill aimed at strengthening the
ability of the United States to compete with
China. If that happens, Lewis fears univer-
sities could create administrative “buffer
zones” that discourage other kinds of inter-
actions with China, in order to make sure
that faculty don’t violate the ban.
That prospect troubles Peter Michelson,
a physicist at Stanford University. Last year,
he helped organize a faculty petition ask-
ing Attorney General Merrick Garland to
end the China Initiative that has become
a template for similar letters from many
U.S. campuses. “I’m afraid that university
administrators have become increasingly
gutless in standing up to government re-
search agencies because they are so depen-
dent on federal funding,” he says. Chinese
students—who represent a significant frac-
tion of U.S. graduate students in many tech-
nical areas—are increasingly wary of coming
to a country they believe doesn’t want them,
Michelson adds. “This year [at Stanford]
there was a significant drop in the number
and quality of Chinese applicants to some of
our graduate programs,” he says.
Such thorny issues are a big reason many
scholars see DOJ’s announcement as only
a first step. The name change “recognizes
that our concerns were legitimate,” says
John Yang, president of Advancing Justice-
AAJC, an advocacy group. “But there is a lot
more work to be done.” j
T
hree new studies offer one indisput-
able conclusion about the origin of
SARS-CoV-2: Despite the passage of
2 years and the Chinese government’s
lack of transparency, data that can
shed light on the pandemic’s greatest
mystery still exist. And although these new
analyses don’t all reach the same conclu-
sion for how COVID-19 was sparked, each
undercuts the theory that the virus some-
how escaped from the Wuhan Institute of
Virology, long a focus of suspicions.
The studies examine different aspects
of the viral spread at the Huanan Seafood
Market in Wuhan, China, the
city where the first cases were
detected. Two international
efforts build the case that
SARS-CoV-2 jumped to peo-
ple from infected animals—a
zoonotic leap—at the market,
likely twice, at the end of 2019.
A third, largely Chinese ef-
fort details early signs of the
coronavirus in environmen-
tal samples from the market.
But it suggests the virus was
imported there, perhaps from
outside the country—a conclusion the Uni-
versity of Arizona’s Michael Worobey, an
evolutionary biologist who is a correspond-
ing author of the two international studies,
calls “a huge disconnect.”
The studies were posted as preprints
and are not peer reviewed, but scientists,
biosecurity experts, journalists, and oth-
ers are already intensely examining their
details. “I have been brought closer to the
zoonosis side with these preprints,” says
Flo Débarre, an evolutionary biologist
at the French national research agency,
CNRS, who has followed the origin debate
closely and not thrown her lot with either
the natural-origin or the lab-leak camp.
Evolutionary biologist William Hanage of
Harvard University agrees these studies
“will be taken as a blow” to the lab-leak
hypothesis. “They substantially move the
needle on the origins in the direction of
the market,” Hanage says.Skeptics of the natural-origin theory
maintain the market cluster could merely
be a superspreader event touched off when
a person infected with a lab-escaped corona-
virus visited it. But Worobey thinks further
data could make that contention even less
tenable. A more transparent analysis of the
market’s genetic sampling data, in particu-
lar, might identify exactly which species of
animals sold there carried the virus.
In one study, Worobey and colleagues
describe two subtly different lineages of
SARS-CoV-2 that were found in people
and environmental samples at the Hua-
nan Seafood Market in late 2019, which
they take as a sign that the virus jumped
twice from animals to humans
there. Their other study of-
fers a geospatial analysis of
the earliest human cases that
pinpoints the market as the
“epicenter” of SARS-CoV-2’s
emergence, showing both lin-
eages infected people who had
links to the market or lived
near it. It also connects the
specific stalls at the market
where live animals were sold
to SARS-CoV-2-infected envi-
ronmental samples. “Together,
these analyses provide dispositive evidence
for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the
live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan
market as the un-ambiguous epicenter of
the COVID-19 pandemic,” they conclude.
Worobey and colleagues had hoped to
release their preprints in the next week
but sped up their plans, choosing a pre-
print server, Zenodo, that posts without
any delays, when the Chinese study was
posted on 25 February on the Research
Square site. Led by George Gao of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-
authored by 37 other scientists (one is
from Canada), that research—which builds
on data earlier leaked to the media but
never officially published—offers the most
detailed description yet of the environ-
mental samples the Chinese Center for
Disease Control and Prevention obtained
at the Huanan Seafood Market between
1 January and 2 March 2020.“I have been
brought
closer to the
[natural-origin]
side with
these preprints.”
Flo Débarre, CNRSStudies bolster pandemic origin
in Wuhan animal market
Close scrutiny of earliest cases and samples from market
suggests virus crossed over from animals sold there
COVID-By Jon Cohen