The WHO hopes its new panel can determine the origin of COVID-19. Some experts are skeptical

An "imbalanced" group of experts and China's resistance to co-operate means the World Health Organization's new panel is unlikely to determine whether the origin of COVID-19 can be found in nature or traced to a lab leak, some experts suggest.

The WHO announced last week it had formed a new advisory group to to look into the origins of emerging and re-emerging pathogens of epidemic and pandemic potential, including COVID-19. 

Called the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), the 26-member proposed panel includes four members who took part in a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan earlier this year with Chinese scientists.

Alina Chan, a Canadian molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, said she doesn't have much faith in it.

"Based on the outcomes of the China-WHO joint study and the persistent lack of access to data and information in China, I'm not confident that the current list of SAGO members will make any headway into the origin of COVID-19," Chan, who also launched an open-source website to track COVID-19's genetic evolution, told CBC News in an email.

She was one of 18 scientists who signed a letter in May that was published in Science. It criticized the original panel's report about the origin of COVID-19 for not giving proper consideration to the lab-leak theory.

In an email to CBC News, Chan questioned the composition of the new panel, suggesting that some of the members from the original group who are on this new panel may carry biases.

She said she was disappointed that WHO did not take the opportunity to start SAGO on a clean slate and to pick experts who are as "uncontroversial as possible."

"Most of the international experts convened on the highly criticized initial joint study with China are back on SAGO," Chan said in an email to CBC News, "It will now be difficult to convince people that the new SAGO will be much different from the original joint study group.

"This could have been a fresh start to a WHO investigation of the origin of COVID, but they picked a committee that is, in my opinion, imbalanced and lacking in strong expertise in biosecurity and bioengineering."

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who directs the World Health Organization Center on Global Health Law, also expressed skepticism about the panel's potential success.

"This new committee is highly reliant on China to allow them access to its territory, its scientific samples and its people — independent scientists, whistle blowers, health care workers and others," he said in a phone interview with CBC News. 

"Trying to find the origins without China's co-operation is going to be extremely difficult.… If the U.S. intelligence agencies couldn't do it using covert methods, I don't know how a WHO team of scientists can possibly do that."

Last March, an initial team of WHO investigators released a report that determined that it was "likely to very likely," the coronavirus had a zoonotic source, meaning it was transmitted to humans by animals. The also concluded the idea that a laboratory incident was the source was "extremely unlikely."