A team of scientists from the World Health Organization is investigating more than a year after it broke out the secrets of the pandemic: where the coronavirus came from and how it spread to humans.
The long-awaited journey, initially hampered by delays by China, has embarked on a long process to pinpoint the origin of the virus to answer important questions about the pathogen and how to prevent similar – and possibly worse – future outbreaks.
But the world will be watching the results of the investigation – and China’s willingness to cooperate will also be the focus of intense interest around the world.
That the trip took place more than a year after the virus was first identified has raised concerns that the government was not transparent in dealing with the virus. And political quarrels arose, especially between China and the United States, with the Trump administration blaming China for the pandemic.
Fifteen members of the WTO delegation of scientists would arrive in China, but two were denied access after testing positive for coronavirus antibodies, according to the World Body in Singapore.
While many researchers emphasize the need for science, not politics, to guide the work of the WHO, experts warn that they need to navigate through a political quagmire.
“The purpose of the investigation is not to identify a guilty country or authority,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow in global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations. , said. ‘But we must also be realistic: this is a very politicized world, and if research suggests that China is the origin of the outbreak, the hypothetical finding could indeed be used as evidence of smoking weapons to support claims that China is guilty . ‘
China has come under heavy criticism for allegedly downplaying the seriousness of the initial outbreak of the mysterious, pneumonia-like disease in December, and for failing to act quickly enough to warn the WHO of evidence of transmission of man to man not.
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The suspicion about China’s handling of the outbreak came after the problematic response to the SARS pandemic in 2003, when it was found that Chinese officials were suppressing and deliberately withholding information from the public. The WHO praised China early on for its efforts to curb the Covid-19 outbreak, but there are still questions about where and how the pathogen originated.
The WHO investigation is taking place against the background of China’s efforts to strictly control information about the pandemic. Last month, a Chinese court sentenced a civilian journalist to four years in prison for reporting on the early outbreak in the city of Wuhan, independent of the state-run media.
Reports also surfaced last year that a 34-year-old doctor named Li Wenliang was punished by the police for warning about the virus in the messaging app WeChat in December 2019. Li joined Covid-19 a few months later deceased and after a spate of criticism, the government took disciplinary action against the police officers involved and posthumously described him as a ‘martyr’.
Few details about the WHO’s visit have been released, but one focus of the investigation will probably be to establish a timeline of events and determine where there are still gaps in knowledge, said dr. Dale Fisher, chair of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response, said. Network, established by the WHO to respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Fisher, who is not involved in the current investigation, was part of a WHO mission that visited China in February 2020 to assess the rapidly evolving outbreak. During the trip, the team traveled to Wuhan, Hubei Province, where the virus is thought to have originated, and the researchers subsequently published a 40-page report outlining what was then known about how the coronavirus spread and how it can be contained.
At the time, the WHO itself was criticized for not doing enough to warn the rest of the world about the coronavirus and for relying too much on information coming from Chinese officials. In May, President Donald Trump accused the WHO of being a ‘puppet of China’ and announced that the US would withdraw its funding for the agency.
President Joe Biden signed an executive action within hours of his inauguration to rejoin the WHO.
Tight control
While WHO scientists say they hope Chinese scientists will come, it is known that Beijing has controlled information about the coronavirus.
According to an investigation report published by The Associated Press in December, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has pushed for an investigation into the origin of the virus and ordered any findings to be approved by a task force that reports directly to President Xi Jinping. . NBC News did not confirm the AP report.
The problem, according to Huang of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, is the potentially conflicting motivations that drive Chinese scientists and politicians.
“China does have an incentive to investigate the origins of the outbreak, not only to end the current pandemic, but also to prepare for the next one,” he said. “But the research has been approved by the government, which raises concerns about the extent to which they are willing to share the information with the WHO.”
The Chinese government’s history of secrecy has fueled theories that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a prominent research facility that was the first in China to receive the highest level of biosafety clearance. No reliable evidence has been found to support such allegations, but researchers who traveled to China this week said their goal was to follow science.
“If this is the point where the investigation brings us as a hypothesis, we will not rule it out,” said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who is a member of the WTO delegation, saying that the virus may be out. a laboratory leaked. .
Most research to date on the origin of the coronavirus has focused on a seafood market in Wuhan, which has been linked to the earliest cases of Covid-19. But Koopmans said it was also possible that the virus originated elsewhere in China.
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“I think it is likely that Wuhan was a widespread event,” she said, adding that some cases identified in early December had no visible link with the seafood market. But according to her, the team will investigate a number of different hypotheses.
After groups of Covid-19s were reported in Wuhan and evidence emerged that the virus was spreading among humans, China placed the sprawling city of 11 million people under a strict lockdown on January 23, 2020.
After China reported nearly 99,000 cases and more than 4,800 deaths, China has managed to keep the virus relatively limited, although a new closure has been introduced in Hebei Province, near Beijing, after the region has seen an increase in January since have seen new infections. 2.
In the US, more than 420,000 people were killed and more than 25 million cases were reported.
In many ways, the crisis in the US has increased interest in China domestically, especially after the government experienced a setback from its own citizens early in the pandemic because they mishandled the response, said Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser to Asia at the Center for Strategic, said. and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
“There was a period of a few months in China where it was clear that people were criticizing the government, and the Communist Party worked very hard to get the story under control and turn it into a positive one,” he said. she said.
The level of disagreement was unusual and comes mainly from younger Chinese people crossing a dangerous border in China by questioning the government’s legitimacy, she added.
Since then, most cities in China have become more or less normal and there are signs that the economy is recovering, although experts have warned that the actual number of Covid-19 cases and deaths in China could be much higher than the government officially reported.
“The story today is that China was successful in preventing the spread, and that it was much more successful than the US and other democracies around the world,” Glaser said.
Still, the WHO investigation will force the Chinese government to protect the domestic narratives by defending the country’s international reputation, according to Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The WHO does have leverage because it is important for China’s global health diplomacy,” he said. “The last thing China wants is to quarrel with the WHO in public, because that would look diplomatic and politically bad.”