Originally published 2020-04-18.
In April 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading around the world, China quietly introduced extra government vetting for academic research on the new coronavirus. Papers that tried to trace where the virus came from faced the strictest rules of all: they needed approval from central government bodies before they could be submitted to a journal or even posted online. The rules came to light when two Chinese universities published internal notices on their websites, which were then taken down within hours or days.
The restrictions did not ban research outright, but they gave the state a say over what was published, and when. Here is what the rules said, how scientists reacted, and what is known today about the virus's origins.
What the April 2020 rules required
According to reporting by CNN and the journal Nature, the directive came from the science and technology department of China's Ministry of Education. It followed a 25 March 2020 meeting of the State Council's COVID-19 prevention and control task force, the central body coordinating the response.
Nature described two documents:
- A 10 March notice saying institutions needed approval from the Ministry of Education and the State Council's joint prevention and control mechanism before announcing findings on the virus's origin, transmission, treatments or vaccines.
- A 7 April notice setting out a layered process. Studies on the source of the virus first went to a university academic committee, then to the ministry's science and technology department, which passed them to the State Council task force. Only after hearing back could a university submit the paper, and this applied to preprint servers and blogs as well as journals.
Other COVID-19 papers were also screened by university committees, which were asked to judge their "academic value" and whether the timing of publication was right. The directive said research tracing the virus's origin had to be strictly and tightly managed.
How the rules became public
The School of Information Science and Technology at Fudan University, one of China's top universities, posted the notice on its website, then removed it. The China University of Geosciences in Wuhan posted a similar notice, which was also deleted, although a cached copy remained. When CNN called the contact number on the document, a ministry staff member confirmed the directive had been issued but said it was an internal document that was not supposed to be made public. The ministries did not publish the rules on their own websites and did not respond to Nature's questions.
How scientists reacted
Reactions were mixed. Some researchers inside China had not even heard of the new process. A few supported a degree of screening: the conservation scientist Alice Hughes told Nature that vetting could curb rushed, sensational studies, such as an early paper that wrongly suggested snakes as the host, and said her own paper had been cleared within 72 hours.
Others were alarmed. An anonymous researcher whose work had been stopped told CNN the rules were a coordinated effort from (the) Chinese government to control (the) narrative
and to suggest the outbreak did not start in China. Outside China, scientists warned about delays at a moment when every week mattered. The epidemiologist Sarah Cobey of the University of Chicago told Nature that filtering results for reasons other than quality could distort the global response, at a cost to human health.
Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, put the political risk plainly. When research has to serve those in power, he told CNN, it further undermines the credibility of the government narrative
, making accusations of underreporting and misinformation more convincing.
The political context in spring 2020
The rules arrived during an escalating war of words between Beijing and Washington. In March 2020 a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, had promoted an unfounded theory on Twitter that the US military brought the virus to Wuhan. US politicians, meanwhile, were blaming China for the pandemic. Chinese officials and state media stressed that the origin had not been determined, and CNN reported that the pandemic had by then killed more than 100,000 people and infected about 1.7 million worldwide.
China had also temporarily banned the wildlife trade after the outbreak. Reports in April 2020 said some markets selling live animals had reopened elsewhere in China, while the Huanan market in Wuhan, linked to many early cases, stayed shut.
What we know about the origin of COVID-19 now
The animal-market explanation is sometimes presented as settled fact. It was not settled in 2020, and it is still debated. What can be said with more confidence is this:
- Most scientists who study the question favour natural spillover. The closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 were found in horseshoe bats in Laos and Yunnan. Two 2022 papers in Science linked early cases to the Huanan market, and swab data released in 2023 showed genetic material from raccoon dogs, an animal known to carry coronaviruses, in virus-positive areas of the market.
- A lab-related accident has not been ruled out. The Wuhan Institute of Virology studies bat coronaviruses. Some US agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Energy, have leaned towards a lab-associated origin with differing levels of confidence, while others favour natural spillover; no public evidence directly shows a lab leak.
- Missing data is part of the problem. The 2021 WHO-China study was denied access to raw data, and China refused a second phase. In June 2025 the WHO's scientific advisory group said zoonotic spillover fitted the available evidence best but that the question remained open, because key information from Wuhan had not been shared.
Why research transparency matters
Restricting publication does not prove any particular theory about where a virus came from. What it does is make every theory harder to test. When early data are delayed or withheld, other scientists cannot check them, gaps get filled by speculation, and public trust suffers in every direction.
The lesson from 2020 is a practical one for the next outbreak. Fast, open sharing of genetic sequences, patient data and environmental samples is what lets researchers worldwide track a new pathogen and design tests, treatments and vaccines. The sequencing of SARS-CoV-2, which Chinese scientists shared in January 2020, showed how much good that kind of openness can do. The publication rules that followed showed how easily it can be narrowed.
Sources: CNN, 12 April 2020, China appears to restrict publication of coronavirus research (also via KVIA); Nature, 15 April 2020, China is tightening its grip on coronavirus research; Wikipedia, Origin of SARS-CoV-2; archived Fudan University notice via Internet Archive. Video: CNN.
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