5.
The pangolin papers
‘In the twenty-first century we really should not be eating species to extinction.’
JONATHAN BAILLIE
On 7 February 2020, a press release appeared on the website of South China Agricultural University in the city of Guangzhou, announcing that researchers had found that pangolins might be the mysterious intermediate hosts for the new coronavirus. At a press conference that day the university announced that two of its professors, Dr Shen Yongyi and Dr Xiao Lihua, had found a pangolin virus with 99 per cent genetic similarity to SARS-CoV-2. This is the level of similarity civet coronaviruses had to human SARS, so it was electrifying news. It seemed that the animal that gave the SARS-CoV-2 virus to human beings might have been found.
No such luck. A press conference is not a scientific result. In fact, when the virus genome was finally shared in mid-February, the 99 per cent figure proved to be wrong. The virus was only approximately 90 per cent similar to SARS-CoV-2 overall. The 99 per cent similarity was in one short region of the spike gene – the receptor-binding motif (RBM), a part of the RBD that helps the virus to recognise a receptive host cell for infection. The rest of the genome was more distantly related to the human virus; the closest virus relative in February 2020 was still RaTG13. Nonetheless, here was an animal infected with a SARS-like virus and many scientists latched onto the similarity in the RBD as a clue that pangolins might have been the missing link between a bat virus ancestor and human SARS-CoV-2.
Pangolins, or scaly ant eaters, are of considerable value to practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and hence are frequently trapped and smuggled. They are the most illegally trafficked mammal in the world. There are eight species of pangolin, four of which live in Asia and four in Africa, but all eight find their way to China in large numbers, dead, alive or skinned for their scales. One of the most trafficked is the Malayan pangolin (Manis javanica), also known as the Sunda pangolin or the Javan pangolin, which lives throughout Southeast Asia. It is the pangolin species of most interest in this story. The native Chinese species, smaller but similar in appearance, is almost extinct.
About the size of a small dog, a Malayan pangolin looks a bit like a long, walking brown artichoke, covered in a crazy paving of thick scales from the crown of its small head to the tip of its long tail. The scales are soft in babies but harden with age. Made of keratin, like large fingernails, these scales protect the animal against predators, especially when it rolls into a ball, a habit from which the word ‘pangolin’ derives in the Malayan language (pengguling meaning ‘one who rolls up’). Their tough claws help pangolins dig into termite and ant nests, while the immensely long tongue, half as long as the body when extended and bizarrely attached near the animal’s pelvis, is used to probe into the recesses of the ant nests, extracting the insects by sticking to them. Lacking teeth, pangolins swallow small stones, much like birds do, so that the muscular stomach can grind the termites and ants into soup. Malayan pangolins live mainly in forests, readily climb trees, sometimes burrow into the ground and are mostly nocturnal. They are also solitary, only occasionally meeting others of their kind, for example when breeding, which makes them poor targets for respiratory viruses. Mothers nurse their young for several months and a baby will sometimes hitch a ride on the mother’s tail.
Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) rescued from poachers and in rehabilitation.
Suzi Eszterhas/Wild Wonders of China/naturepl.com
In September 2019, a group of journalists calling themselves the Global Environmental Reporting Collective put out a report on the pangolin trade called ‘Trafficked to Extinction’. It uncovered a massive criminal enterprise spanning Asia and Africa, feeding pangolins almost exclusively into China. Despite a global ban on traded pangolins, which came into force at the beginning of 2017, the illegal trade apparently reached record levels in 2019. That year nearly forty tonnes of pangolin scales were seized in three operations in Singapore, equivalent to many tens of thousands of the animals. In February 2019, a raid in Sabah, Malaysia, found approximately twenty-eight tonnes of descaled, gutted and frozen pangolins alongside nearly half a tonne of pangolin scales. This was the largest pangolin raid in history.
The vast majority of these animals, alive or dead, or their scales, are imported into China and Vietnam, where they sell for up to $1,800 a kilogram on the black market. The animals are eaten as a prize delicacy while the scales are bought by TCM’s pharmaceutical firms and ground up to be sold as antidotes to cancer, impotence, inflammation and poor lactation. Their medicinal value has not been substantiated by any scientific evidence: you might as well eat your own fingernails, which are made of the same stuff.
The smugglers busted
In March 2019, the Guangdong and Guangxi Anti-Smuggling Bureaus, working with more than three hundred police forces in several countries, swooped on wildlife smuggling syndicates across southern China and arrested thirty-four suspects. Along with snakes, eagles, tortoises, geckos and other endangered species that were found stuffed into bags or cages were 155 pangolins, of which 103 were still alive. The pangolins had been smuggled through Vietnam, most probably from further south. Most of the animals were held in Guangxi province, but twenty-one live pangolins were rescued in Guangdong. These were taken to the Guangdong Wildlife Rescue Center in a suburb of Guangzhou, where they were kept in two small rooms. It is these twenty-one animals that may contain some kind of clue to the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
The twenty-one pangolins were in poor health and began to die within a few days. When only five were left, on 17 April 2019, the authorities allowed a private foundation, the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, to try to rescue the survivors. This was unprecedented: the foundation had been begging to care for confiscated pangolins since 2017. Yet, despite shipping in frozen ants, they were unable to save two of the animals, named ‘Dahu’ and ‘Meidong’. Another would die later. We have been unable to discern the fate of the last two, which were taken by forestry administration officials.
When pangolin genomes were first fully sequenced in 2016, it emerged that they are unique among mammals in having a defective version of a critical immune system gene called interferon epsilon; and this seems to be true of African as well as Asian species. This gene plays a significant role in innate immunity, the first line of defence against infection on the surface of the body, especially on the skin and on mucosa-protected tissues such as lungs, intestines and reproductive tissues. The Malaysian scientists who discovered this fact concluded that pangolin ‘innate immunity may be compromised, resulting in an increased susceptibility to infection, particularly in the skin and mucosa-protected organs’. This weak mucosal immunity renders pangolins ‘prone to frequently fatal gastrointestinal disease, pneumonia, and skin maladies’, which is one reason they so often die in captivity.
Eleven of the twenty-one pangolins seized in Guangzhou were examined after their deaths at the Guangdong Institute of Applied Biological Resources. In an October 2019 paper in the journal Viruses, the researchers, Dr Liu Ping, Dr Chen Wu and Dr Chen Jinping, reported that most of the dead pangolins had swollen lungs filled with ‘a frothy liquid’. They took twenty-one samples from the lungs, lymph and spleens of the eleven animals, and searched for viral genomes. They found plenty. In all, there were fourteen different families of viruses detected and 85 per cent of the sequences were from two families of virus, the paramyxoviruses and herpes viruses. One of the paramyxoviruses, Sendai virus, was found in six animals.
In only two of the pangolins did they find coronaviruses, albeit possibly several different kinds. The similarity of some of the sequences to SARS-like sequences led the researchers to conclude that this might have been the cause of death in these two animals. The authors did not know whether the pangolins had died from an infection by the Sendai or SARS-like virus. However, the study observed ominously, ‘Malayan pangolins could be another host with the potential of transmitting the SARS coronavirus to humans.’ This paper was sent to the journal Viruses on 30 September 2019, and published on 24 October, shortly before the first cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan.
Curiously, the data behind this paper was only released three months after publication, on 22 January 2020, by which time the pandemic was well under way. These were the samples that the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou reanalysed in early February, finding that they contained a coronavirus with a spike RBM close to 99 per cent the same as that of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing sickness in Wuhan. After their press conference on 7 February, a burst of scientific preprints followed on 18 and 20 February, all purporting to present pangolin coronaviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The titles of these four separate preprints told a confident and compelling story: ‘Identifying SARS-CoV-2-related Coronaviruses in Malayan Pangolins’ (Lam et al., Nature); ‘Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related Coronavirus from Malayan Pangolins’ (Xiao et al., Nature); ‘Are Pangolins the Intermediate Host of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)?’ (Liu et al., PLoS Pathogens); and ‘Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak’ (Zhang et al., Current Biology).
Many people who read these papers received the impression that many different pangolins were infected with a SARS-like coronavirus closely resembling SARS-CoV-2, emphasising the likelihood that pangolins were the intermediate host that transmitted the virus to humans. Intentionally or not, the four papers left a strong impression that the problem had been close to solved.
A well-adapted virus
In February 2020, one of us (Alina) had been closely following the news of the novel coronavirus as it started appearing in countries all around the globe. Italy was devastated by the virus. Iran and the United States would soon follow. First New York was hit, then in the first week of March, news emerged that the virus had spread at a scientific conference in Boston. Within half a year, this superspreader event in Boston would eventually lead to an estimated three hundred thousand cases worldwide.
The incident led the Broad Institute, one of the world’s leading biomedical institutions, to tell all employees to stay home. Alina and her colleagues wanted to find a way to contribute to the research efforts against this growing outbreak. It was unclear when the laboratories would reopen so Alina decided to take a look at what data she could analyse online. In late March, top experts who had been anticipating and watching for potentially dangerous changes in the SARS-CoV-2 genome noticed that there had been no significant change in the biology of the virus. To their relief, there were no signs that the new virus was evolving and accumulating useful mutations to infect human beings more effectively – as the SARS virus had done at the beginning of the 2003 epidemic.
This apparent difference between SARS-CoV-2 and the 2003 SARS virus piqued Alina’s interest. She enlisted the help of Dr Shing Hei Zhan, a friend from graduate school at the University of British Columbia, Canada, to compare the evolution of the two SARS viruses side by side. This analysis – which would not have been possible with epidemics before the year 2000, after which genetic sequencing became readily available – revealed that the novel coronavirus more closely resembled SARS in the late phase of the 2003 epidemic after the virus had already picked up numerous advantageous adaptations for human infection and transmission. SARS-CoV-2 was very likely already well adapted to its new human hosts. The early genomes of the 2003 SARS virus diversified like a tall tree, accumulating dozens of mutations over the first three months of the epidemic and across eleven patients. In comparison, the early genomes of SARS-CoV-2 from December 2019 through to March 2020 were all highly similar and, despite the more rigorous sampling of Covid-19 cases worldwide, produced a flatter structure with fewer accumulated changes in its genome across dozens of patients.
The genomes of the 2003 SARS epidemic therefore told a story of an animal pathogen that was new to human hosts and evolved rapidly among the earliest human cases, before settling down into a much slower phase of virus evolution once it had become proficient at spreading in human populations. In sharp contrast, SARS-CoV-2 had shown no early phase of rapid evolution: it was as though a virus highly adept at infecting and transmitting between human beings had appeared out of thin air at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market in December 2019.
The puzzle for Covid-19 was that no precursor or closely related ‘siblings’ of the virus had been found. When Dr Zhan and Alina looked at the available SARS-CoV-2 sequences from the environmental samples collected at the market (some of which had been published in February), they noticed that these were essentially identical to the human virus isolates. Furthermore, no details had been released concerning animal samples at the Huanan seafood market. This stood in strong contrast to the market investigations for SARS in 2003 and 2004: numerous animals at multiple markets had tested positive for SARS virus back then, and the viruses isolated from the animals had proved to be siblings to the viruses isolated from human patients – in other words they were very closely related but they were sufficiently different that it could be deduced that the market animals were infected with a different variant from the one causing the human epidemic. Significant differences showed up particularly in the spike of the animal and human versions of the 2003 SARS virus, and some of the human virus mutations later proved to be functionally important, enabling the virus to better bind to the human ACE2 receptor. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, no market animals had been reported to be positive for the virus, and the market’s environmental samples were more than 99.9 per cent identical to the human virus isolates, even when comparing spike sequences. This suggested human contamination of the market rather than the presence of infected animals in the virus at the market in December 2019.
This work culminated in a preprint authored by Dr Zhan, Dr Chan and Alina’s supervisor at the Broad Institute, Dr Ben Deverman, on 2 May 2020, noting that: ‘If intermediate animal hosts were present at the market, no evidence remains in the genetic samples available.’ The paper infamously included speculation about how the novel SARS-CoV-2 might have evolved to transmit between human beings so effectively: ‘There is presently little evidence to definitively support any particular scenario of SARS-CoV-2 adaptation. Did SARS-CoV-2 transmit across species into humans and circulate undetected for months prior to late 2019 while accumulating adaptive mutations? Or was SARS-CoV-2 already well adapted for humans while in bats or an intermediate species? More importantly, does this pool of human-adapted progenitor viruses still exist in animal populations? Even the possibility that a non-genetically-engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely.’
The authors of Zhan et al. had no inkling of the media storm that would ensue because of that single sentence about the possibility of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2. Alina was aware that the issue had been politicised by comments made by members of both the US and Chinese governments. However, she was determined not to let politics dictate what she could or could not write in her research papers. After the preprint was posted, Alina asked the Broad Institute’s communications department for advice on how to share the preprint on Twitter and discovered what a ‘tweetorial’ is – a Twitter thread that serves as a tutorial for a scientific paper.
Ian Birrell, writing for the Mail on Sunday in London, picked up on the preprint and ran a story on 17 May titled ‘Landmark Study: Virus Didn’t Come from Animals in Wuhan Market’. That same day, Newsweek and several other media outlets ran articles about the preprint, with a focus on the possible lab origin and the lack of evidence pointing to a natural zoonosis from animals to humans at the seafood market. Then, quietly, on 25 May, the Chinese CDC director, Dr Gao, announced the transformative conclusion that the virus had existed long before the market and that none of the animal samples from the market had tested positive for the virus.
When the WHO prepared a preliminary document on the origin of the outbreak in November 2020, it included a similar point to that which Drs Zhan, Chan and Deverman had made in May: ‘Current findings show that the virus has been remarkably stable since it was first reported in Wuhan, with sequences well conserved in different countries, suggesting that the virus was well adapted to human transmission from the moment it was first detected. This is also corroborated by the epidemiology and transmission patterns seen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.’ Given the furious online criticism of Alina and her colleagues for using the phrase ‘well adapted’ in their preprint in May, this was a welcome endorsement.
An anonymous late-night tip
On 11 May 2020, shortly after Alina had posted the Zhan et al. preprint and created a tweetorial for it, an anonymous Twitter user named lllandca posted to her thread, in Chinese, that the origins of the pangolin samples in the Xiao et al. Nature paper were worth looking into. Intrigued, Alina responded to lllandca seeking clarification and went through each of the pangolin papers with a fine-tooth comb. To her surprise, all the pangolin coronaviruses with a spike receptor-binding domain similar to SARS-CoV-2, described across the four pangolin papers, came from the same batch of animals at the Guangdong Wildlife Rescue Center, confiscated from smugglers in late March 2019, mostly dying from respiratory disease.
When the four papers were formally published following peer review in May 2020, Alina, together with Dr Zhan, contacted the journals Nature and PLoS Pathogens to seek the detailed genomic data behind the results, much of which had not been made available but could hold important clues as to how each viral genome was assembled. Replication is after all a key part of the scientific method. Strangely, although one of the studies, the Xiao et al. Nature paper, claimed to have isolated virus particles in the laboratory by infecting cultures of Vero cells (derived from monkey kidney cells), they chose instead to assemble their genome by amplifying fragments of sequences from multiple frozen pangolin samples. The very title of their paper was ‘Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related Coronavirus from Malayan Pangolins’. Virus isolates – real, complete viruses – would have provided fuller and cleaner genomes than fragments from the pangolin tissue samples.
On closer inspection, Alina and Dr Zhan found that Xiao et al. had in fact republished the same samples under different names without proper attribution to the original October 2019 Liu et al. study in the journal Viruses. They had also used an inconsistent definition of ‘total reads’ in their sample description that made it difficult to match their samples with those from the 2019 paper, thus making it challenging for other scientists to determine that the two data sets were the same. The samples described as lung02, lung07, lung08 and lung11 by Liu et al. in 2019 were the very same samples as those called M3, M2, M4 and M8 by Xiao et al. only a few months later in 2020. The high-quality profile of a single sample described by Xiao et al. was actually derived mostly from Liu et al.’s previously published lung08 and most likely a composite of more than one sample. In fact, all four pangolin papers relied on the same data from the October 2019 study to produce a virus genome with a similar spike RBD to SARS-CoV-2. It is all but impossible, based on published data and information, to determine which sequences came from which samples, or which samples came from which animals.
In November 2020, as a result of Alina’s and Dr Zhan’s efforts, the journal Nature added an ‘editor’s note’ to the Xiao et al. paper, reading as follows: ‘Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin samples reported in this paper and their relationship to previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial action will be taken once this matter is resolved.’ Despite its mild wording, this is a rare intervention by a leading journal like Nature. These pangolin papers were prepared by scientists, some of whom knew each other, used overlapping data sets, confused names of samples, and were not clear or accurate in their explanation of the data and sample histories. Close to a year later, no further editorial action was taken by Nature, however.
In the same month, the US Right to Know organisation published emails regarding the Liu et al. PLoS Pathogens paper of May 2020, revealing that the editor of the paper, Dr Stanley Perlman, had acknowledged that he had not checked the veracity of a sample or for the existence of data supporting the paper. ‘Concerns about similarities between the two studies came to light only after both studies had been published,’ wrote Dr Perlman. ‘I regret that these issues were not discovered and addressed prior to publication.’ Finally, in June 2021, a correction of the paper was published, noting that the similarities between the pangolin coronavirus and SARS-CoV-2 were ‘not strong enough to support that pangolins are intermediate hosts of SARS-CoV-2’.
To provide an analogy, this would be similar to four different teams of clinicians publishing separate papers on the same group of patients with a rare disease without clarifying that they were all describing the same patients, or that they had already published a previous paper only a few months before describing these patients. With confused patient histories and data, and even different names provided for the same patients, the readers of these numerous papers could mistakenly conclude that there are several distinct groups of patients with the affliction and get the impression the disease is more common than it is.
When confronted by US Right to Know, the authors of the PLoS Pathogens pangolin paper, Liu et al., confirmed that they had not provided the novel data described in their paper and said, ‘We are different research groups from Nature paper authors, and there is no relationship with each other . . . and we don’t know where the samples of the Nature paper from.’ For context, the senior authors of both papers, in PLoS Pathogens and Nature, had co-published the data set released on 22 January 2020 and re-used it in both papers posted as preprints in mid-February 2020.
It is difficult to avoid the perception that there could have been a political or public-relations motive driving the work. We know from internal Chinese government documents, seen by the Associated Press, that the pangolin studies were sponsored by various government agencies. The virologist Dr Linfa Wang of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore told the Associated Press the search for the coronavirus in pangolins did not appear to be ‘scientifically driven’.
A pangolin by any other name
This may seem like a storm in a scientific teacup to outsiders. Some scientists working on pangolins appear to have been republishing the same data in such a way as to generate more papers in high-profile journals. Does it affect the story of the virus origin? Yes, it does, because the world received the impression that SARS coronavirus infection in pangolins is a common phenomenon, which makes the event of a human catching the virus from a pangolin more probable. Now we know that of more than a hundred live pangolins intercepted by Chinese customs officers in March 2019, only two were certainly carrying coronaviruses at the time they were analysed in Guangdong province. They might have caught the virus from any of the other trafficked animals under duress and unsanitary trafficking conditions.
Scientists working with the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, who had tried to rescue the surviving Guangdong pangolins, said: ‘Pangolins are actually unlikely to be the natural reservoir or intermediate hosts due to several reasons.’ They reported that more than twenty people had ‘continuous unprotected physical contact with the CoV-infected animals’; one person had even cared for the sick pangolins for more than seventy days. None of them reported falling sick.
However, one of the four papers preprinted in February 2020, later published as Lam et al. in Nature, while rehashing the same data from the Guangdong pangolins, did also report data from sick pangolins in the neighbouring Guangxi province. These had been intercepted between August 2017 and January 2018. Samples had been collected from multiple organs such as lungs, intestines and blood. Sequencing revealed evidence of coronaviruses in samples from five animals. This virus was much less similar to SARS-CoV-2 than the one from the Guangdong pangolins, let alone the bat virus RaTG13, so it was of little relevance to the search for the origin of Covid-19, but it was nonetheless a SARS-related virus. Dr Lam and his colleagues then tested another set of samples from twelve pangolins intercepted between May and July 2018, and found that three were positive for coronavirus. Yet, to our knowledge, no sequence data has been shared concerning these coronavirus-positive samples from 2018.
Apart from smuggled pangolins, the search for pangolins in the wild with similar viruses has drawn a blank. In June 2020, Dr Peter Daszak and his collaborators reported an analysis of 334 smuggled pangolins confiscated in Malaysia between 2009 and 2019, finding no signs of coronavirus or any zoonotic virus for that matter. The team speculated that the pangolins are more likely infected on the way to market, not in the wild: ‘Our samples were drawn from an “upstream” cohort of animals yet to enter or just entering the illegal trade network, whereas all others were drawn from “downstream” cohorts confiscated at their destination in China.’
Based on our understanding of pangolin biology and the scientific evidence to date, it appears highly unlikely that wild populations of these animals carry SARS-like coronaviruses. Pangolins live solitary lives in the wild, making them poor hosts for coronaviruses, which thrive on victims that regularly meet in large gatherings, like bats and people. Furthermore, the severity of the illness afflicting the smuggled pangolins, trafficked thousands of kilometres from their native habitats, suggests that if these coronavirus infections were common in wild populations, these animals would have been wiped out. To this day there remains no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus passed through pangolins before emerging in humans.
To put the final nail in the coffin, in June 2021, a bombshell publication in Scientific Reports revealed that no pangolins or bats had been found to be traded in Wuhan’s markets between May 2017 and November 2019. The Chinese scientists who authored the paper had serendipitously been cataloguing wild animal sales across Wuhan’s animal markets, reaching a total of 47,381 animals across thirty-eight species. Their aim was to search for the animal origin of a tick-borne fever in the province, and they had no inkling of how valuable their data would become once Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan. The scientists were especially confident that their research was complete because vendors had ‘freely disclosed a variety of protected species on sale illegally in their shops, therefore they would not benefit from specifically concealing the pangolin trade’. Although regulations in China at the time made the sale of most of these wild animals illegal, the traders and their customers were not particularly bothered, according to the scientists. Thirty-one of the species they had observed were protected under ‘China’s List of Terrestrial Wild Animals of Significant Ecological, Scientific, or Social Value Protected by the State’, meaning that if any of these animals were found to have been taken from the wild and traded as food, the offender could face imprisonment and fines. Yet about 30 per cent of the mammals inspected had wounds indicating gun injuries or traps, suggesting illegal hunting, and the vendors had not hidden these animals from the scientists. Furthermore, the scientists had made clear that they were not from law enforcement. The vendors at the Wuhan markets had been forthcoming because they too were interested in finding the source of the tick-borne disease. Neither the scientists nor the traders had the prescience to know that bats or pangolins would later become implicated as possible sources of the 2019 novel coronavirus, so they would not have specifically hidden away bats or pangolins instead of the numerous other endangered or protected species on sale. Later, when the scientists wrote their paper, they emphasised that bats were not typically consumed in central China.
Secret pangolin research
On 15 January 2021, the US State Department released a fact sheet on ‘Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’ highlighting, among several notable points, that ‘the WIV became a focal point for international coronavirus research after the 2003 SARS outbreak and has since studied animals including mice, bats, and pangolins’. Needless to say, this announcement took many people by surprise and raised more questions than it answered. What was the animal coronavirus research that was being performed at the WIV? Were SARS viruses involved in these animal experiments, considering the presence of a world-class SARS laboratory in the institute? When had experiments involving pangolins and coronaviruses begun? Before or after the emergence of Covid-19?
As a scientist and science writer reviewing this timeline of events, we find several things unsettling about the whole pangolin episode. There was the publication of a pangolin coronavirus with such a similar spike receptor-binding domain (RBD) only a few weeks before the emergence of Covid-19; the release of the pangolin coronavirus data behind the 2019 paper on 22 January 2020, the same day that China announced the Huanan seafood market was the culprit; the posting within three days in February of four manuscripts all describing the same pangolin coronavirus; and the variety of scientific issues plaguing some of these papers’ descriptions of the pangolin coronavirus genome with the SARS-CoV-2-like spike RBD.
The questions we would like to ask, if and when Chinese scientists are allowed to answer, are these. After the intercepted March 2019 pangolins had been sampled and sequenced, where was the virus data stored and who had access to this data? Could other scientists have attempted to characterise (clone and study the function of) the novel spike RBD? When were the 2017 and 2018 smuggled pangolins sampled and sequenced? Could the finding of distantly related SARS-like viruses in these animals have prompted more research interest before late 2019? Or were these samples simply sitting in freezers until Covid-19 emerged and scientists decided to test them for coronavirus?
We stress that there is no evidence that any such experiments on pangolins were attempted, let alone that they resulted in an accidental leak. But it is very much within the capabilities of some laboratories to do such a project, as we shall show in a later chapter. Indeed, it would not be an irrational experiment to conduct if you were curious about newly discovered pangolin SARS-like coronaviruses that you thought might someday cause an epidemic.
Will Covid-19 put an end to the pangolin trade?
Animal lovers rejoiced prematurely when China announced a ban on the trade of wild animals in February 2020 – the same month that the four pangolin papers were posted as preprints. It turned out that the ban applied to animals being traded for consumption but, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, not to the trade of exotic animals for fur, medicine or research. Which meant it would be essentially pointless for an animal such as the pangolin which has been aggressively hunted and trafficked mainly for the use of its scales in traditional Chinese medicine, and for which trade was already illegal before the emergence of Covid-19.
In October 2020, the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international watchdog, revealed that eBay and Taobao (a Chinese shopping website similar to Amazon) were continuing to market pangolin products, and that more than two hundred companies were still licensed to sell these products. In spite of the Chinese government having removed pangolin scales from its list of approved TCM ingredients, the country’s medical insurance system still covered pangolin-containing TCM and companies were still permitted to use the animal’s scales from a national stockpile that ‘never seems to run out’. This is concerning in its own right, but it has another implication. In the face of a pandemic that by the beginning of October 2020 had infected more than thirty-five million people and killed a million, these ineffectual bans seemed half-hearted if the Chinese authorities gave any credence to the hypothesis that pangolins might be the intermediate host of Covid-19.
ACTAsia, part of the Animal Care Trust non-profit organisation, criticised the Chinese ban on wildlife consumption for not being broad enough to address the substantial wildlife trade for fur, TCM, experimentation and entertainment. ACTAsia said that the new law, made shortly after China announced that Covid-19 had come from wild animals, was ‘complex, with loopholes and caveats to renege on every statement of protection, surreptitiously supporting the wildlife trade as a commercial industry, as part of China’s plan for five years out of poverty’. In reality, parts of the new regulation support the captive breeding of wild animals that are listed as ‘livestock’ and include more than forty kinds that have the potential to be intermediate hosts for human pathogens. These wildlife farms are also conducive to spillovers in scenarios in which a large number and variety of animals are held in unsanitary captivity. The farming of bears, tigers and even pangolins is still permitted, which the Environmental Investigation Agency has pointed out could be a cover for laundering illegal wild pangolins due to the severe difficulty of breeding them in captivity and the lack of supervision of such programmes. In April 2021, Reuters reported that pangolins continued to be trafficked into China, especially at lax international borders such as at the special economic zone of Mong La in Myanmar, where there was little government control.
We cannot understand why a government that officially maintains that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in wild animals, farmed or trafficked, would not install and rigorously enforce regulations to comprehensively eliminate these routes for the emergence of dangerous pathogens.