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If a scientist intends to politicise a pandemic, the most unscientific method would be the generation of populist theories without gathering further insight on their data.

The Chinese culture of eating exotic animals has been widely condemned, including by the people of China. Even within China, the difference between Beijing’s mandarin cuisine — from the Southern Cantonese — and rural cuisine such as from Guanzhou, is stark, not to mention the abundant use of exotic animals for medicinal purposes. Many urban and expat Chinese have termed the culture of eating wild animals ‘uncommon’. The viral ‘bat-soup’ video was denied by the Wuhanese, which was allegedly from Palau — an island nation 2,100 km from China.

The expedition in science to trace back ‘patient zero’ of Covid-19 has been largely unbiased, as opposed to the media and political class. The release of preprints — scientific manuscripts yet to be peer-reviewed and thus open to interpretation by the public that lacks the understanding to review science — has been at the centre of such biases. Preprints can be hyped, misunderstood or taken out of context to spread misinformation because quality checks by independent scientists are missing. Previously, two Chinese scientists were criticised for a conspiracy theory based on evidence-free assumptions that claimed the origins of the novel coronavirus as ‘lab-created’. Thorough genetic research published by The Lancet determined that the SARS-CoV-2 is closely related to the SARS-CoV-1 in its receptor binding sites, only to be distinct in some amino acid sequences, and therefore unlikely to be created through an unnatural lab process.

Further phylogenetic analysis of coronavirus from different species revealed that the human SARS-CoV-2 found in 2019 in China is a close relative of the bat coronavirus RATG13 and far from those isolated from other species. Thus, if there was any evidence of a change in the coronavirus’ genome, it could have been through neutral evolution in a host such as humans after an infection. Such changes occur through mutations in five genes of the coronavirus genome, namely S, N, ORF8, ORF3a, and ORF1ab, with about 42 per cent of the variations occurring as non-synonymous mutations. Such mutations of nucleotide substitutions in the amino acid sequence in the protein-coding gene reflect the positive natural selection and evolution, far from the conspiracy theories of a lab-made virus.

Pushing unverified science

Despite most scientists largely holding up the tent of evidence throughout this year, the science available online before being awarded a publication status in a journal has been a barrier in the public understanding of the scientific process and the politics behind it.

The recent preprint by Chinese scientists Libing Shen, Funan He and Zhao Zhang titled ‘The early cryptic transmission and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in human hosts’ suggests that the origins of SARS-CoV-2 may not be in China, but in the Indian subcontinent, coming via Australia before making its way into China — a ghastly allegation given the ongoing nature of the dreadful second Covid-19 wave.

The paper attracted a huge spotlight given that it is a Lancet preprint, even though that has no correlation with the quality of the research, and was featured in many international media platforms. The study claimed to have tested various SARS-CoV-2 strains across the world to compare with the first strain identified in China’s Wuhan. It suggests that this first strain found in Wuhan is not the least mutated strain on the basis of the theory of post-infection mutation in humans through adaptive evolution. It also suggests that the lesser the mutations in the genome, the closer the strain is to the origin of the 2019 virus or patient zero.

The study further claimed that the least mutated virus may have arisen from the Indian subcontinent as the region has the highest strain diversity calculated via statistics and the SARS-CoV-2 mutation rate. This hypothesis also made the Chinese scientists believe that the earliest transmission in human hosts could be in July-August 2019, and not in October-November in China as is widely believed.

More politics than science

Apart from the unverified science, there are two problems with the theory of the Chinese scientists. First, the Indian subcontinent — they specifically singled out India and Bangladesh — is large, populated and well-traveled. It is highly likely that the returning Indian expats, in huge numbers, got infected in their respective countries, thus bringing back the range of diverse strains from different parts of the world, perhaps even from China. At this time of the pandemic, and especially when the world is open for travel, it is impossible to label a group of viral strains as Indian or Chinese. In either case, peer review and further studies are needed to ascertain such origins, and only if it adds value to the current knowledge.

Second, the spread of mutated strains across the globe has not occurred in a linear manner. Once the virus enters the host, it can mutate, replicate and infect others, and can further mutate, all of which occurs through a multi way process globally. Diversity or mutation rate both, inevitably large in a highly populous country like India, does not provide the evidence required to conclude the origins of patient zero in India.

Perhaps scientists need to focus on the existing challenge of the second wave, which is in a terrible state, even in developed countries, despite copious knowledge that the second wave was going to be more severe.

This current pandemic problem is as political as it is scientific. If a scientist intends to politicise a pandemic, the most unscientific method would be the generation of populist theories without gathering further insight on their data. While the need to develop and manufacture vaccines for the masses has become a scientific race to push the human intellect forward as a joint global fraternity, our species have never been so divided during a global health crisis.

Sumaiya Shaikh PhD is an Australian-Swedish neuro scientist, researching the neuroscience of political violence, in Sweden. She is a consultant on security, terrorism and misinformation. She is the founding editor of the fact-checking portal Alt News Science, India. 

This article was originally published on The Print.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.