WHO team in Wuhan launches long-delayed coronavirus investigation after quarantine clears

WHO team in Wuhan launches long-delayed coronavirus investigation after quarantine clears

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Members of the international 13-person team will complete their two-week quarantine in the next 24 hours and walk out to a city that was once the center of the global outbreak, but now, a year later, is largely normal again. The investigation into the work of the team will be huge, as they are on the lookout for a political minefield to discover how the virus that brought most of the world to a halt first originated.

“The eyes of the world are on this, the opinions of the world are on this,” Dutch virologist and team member Marion Koopmans told CNN on Wednesday morning as she prepared for a final round of meetings before leaving her quarantine hotel.

“We are aware of it, there is no way to avoid it. That’s why we try to stay really focused, we are scientists, we are not politicians, we really try to look at it from a scientific perspective.”

Part of that involves giving up all preconceived notions about the development and spread of the virus, to see what the evidence says and to go from there, Koopmans said. The team has spent the past two weeks in video calls with each other and Chinese scientists, “discussing what we know, what we do not know.”

The demand for answers will be great, especially after the investigation itself has been delayed several times, but Koopmans warned patience.

“I think we really have to live up to those expectations. If you look at an earlier search for the origin of outbreaks, it took years to complete,” she said. “The early and relatively easy studies have been done have already been published.”

An earlier report by a WTO team in China, published in February 2020, found that there were ‘significant knowledge gaps’ about the virus, although it endorsed previous findings that the virus apparently originated in animals. , with the probable first outbreak at a seafood. mark in Wuhan.

Political pressure

Although the WTO team will try to ignore the political element of their work, it can be difficult.

Last week, the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response said that both the WTO and China could act faster and more forcefully to curb the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Several countries, notably the United States and Australia, have accused Beijing of underestimating the severity of the outbreak in the early stages, and of preventing an effective response until it was too late. In particular, officials in Wuhan are accused of silencing whistleblowers and obscuring evidence of the virus transmitted between people in a repeat of the 2003 SARS epidemic.

The WHO itself also came under tremendous pressure, with then-US President Donald Trump saying last year that it was a ‘puppet’ of China, and pulling Washington’s funding for the organization. Shortly after his inauguration, President Joe Biden reversed the order.

As China controls the pandemic domestically, in contrast to the ongoing chaos in the US and much of Europe, Beijing has begun to forcefully push back on any allegations of guilt that have promoted alternative – and unfounded – theories of origin. . of the pandemic, including conspiracies over a U.S. military germ laboratory.
Last week in Geneva, the head of the US delegation to WHO called on China to give the team in Wuhan access to ‘caregivers, former patients and laboratory workers’ and to share all scientific studies in samples of animals, humans and the environment taken from a market in Wuhan, reports Reuters.

“We have a serious duty to ensure that this critical inquiry is credible and conducted objectively and transparently,” said U.S. Representative Garrett Grigsby, who caused a reprimand from the Chinese delegation, which put him out of ‘political pressure’. ‘accused.

A woman wears a protective mask when she visits an exhibition in Wuhan, China, on January 26, 2021, about the fight against the coronavirus in the city.

Hard work

A year after Wuhan was locked up, after the city was repeatedly scrubbed and purified to eradicate any trace of the virus, there is skepticism about how much the team of investigators can discover.

“It is very challenging for everyone to find out the cause of this,” said Jin Dongyan, a professor of virology at the University of Hong Kong. “It would now be very difficult to get evidence from the first line to investigate the origin of the SARS-COV-2 and the index cases of Covid-19. It’s really challenging. And I doubt if these international experts can find anything “I’m not very optimistic.”

The extent to which the Chinese authorities are willing to cooperate is unclear, especially as even senior health officials have begun to question whether the virus originated in Wuhan, leading to the theory of ‘multiple origins’ first introduced by the country’s propaganda organs were introduced, promoting attempts to divert blame over the initial handling of the pandemic.

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow on global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said whether the trip of the WHO teams would be successful “depends a lot on how much the government is willing to cooperate and meet in terms of from the research part, enable them to have access to places of interest, and talk to people they want to talk to. “

“The biggest problem is that this case itself is so politicized, that it is really difficult to conduct independent, transparent and thorough investigations,” Huang said, adding that “the international community must also lower their expectations, a more realistic understanding what this journey entails, especially since they plan to complete the study in a few months, we should not really expect anything magical. ‘

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