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The WHO says China has granted permission for a visit by its experts, and a team of 10 is expected to arrive shortly for a five- to six-week visit.
People line up to get tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus outside a hospital in Beijing, China, on January 5, 2021, following the discovery of new cases of the coronavirus in the city in recent days. Image: AFP.
BEIJING – A year after the outbreak began, WHO experts are due to visit China for a highly politicized visit to explore the origins of the coronavirus, on a journey followed by allegations of cover-up, conspiracy and cover-up fears.
Under the global glare, Beijing delayed independent experts’ access to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic, reluctant to agree to an investigation.
But the WHO now says China has granted permission for a visit by its experts, and a team of 10 is expected to arrive shortly for a five- or six-week visit, including a fortnight in quarantine.
The Chinese authorities this week declined to confirm the exact dates and details of the visit, a sign of the enduring sensitivity of their mission.
COVID-19 was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, before seeping beyond China’s borders to wreak havoc, cost more than 1.8 million lives and gut economies.
This photo taken on February 4, 2020 shows a member of the medical staff (R) taking samples from a person for testing for the new coronavirus in a quarantine zone in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, in central China’s province of Hubei. Image: AFP
But its origins remain bitterly controversial, lost in a fog of recriminations and conjecture from the international community, as well as the confusion of Chinese authorities determined to maintain control of its viral narrative.
The WHO team has promised to focus on the science, specifically how the coronavirus jumped from animals, believed to be bats, to humans.
“This is not about finding a guilty country or guilty authority,” Fabian Leendertz of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s central disease control body, who will be among the visiting team, told AFP in late December.
“It’s about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future, to reduce the risk.”
But what the WHO mission can reasonably hope to achieve and the state pressure it will face have been questioned, raising fears that the mission will serve to seal China’s official history, not challenge it.
GEOPOLITICS TRUMP SALUD
The upcoming visit will not be the first time that COVID-19 has brought WHO teams to China. One mission last year looked at the authorities’ response rather than the origins of the virus, and another in the summer laid the groundwork for the next investigation.
But this time the WHO will enter a swamp of competing interests, caught between accusing Western nations and a Chinese leadership determined to demonstrate that its secretive and hierarchical political system served to stop, not spread, the outbreak.
It is unclear who the experts will be able to meet with when they arrive in Wuhan to retrace the early days and weeks of the pandemic.
Inside China, whistleblowers have been silenced and citizen journalists jailed, including a 37-year-old woman jailed last week for four years over video reports from the city during its lengthy shutdown.
Outside, responsibility for the virus has become a weapon.
From the beginning, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, used the virus as a political club against China, a rival of the great power.
He accused Beijing of trying to hide the outbreak of what he called the “China virus” and repeated unfounded rumors that it was leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
Then Trump removed the United States from the WHO, accusing it of being soft on China, a nation with which it was also embroiled in a bitter trade war.
Critics say the storm of accusations sought to divert attention from Washington’s failed response to a crisis that has so far killed more than 350,000 Americans.
Without them, one said, “a lot of these situations that we had in January 2020 would not have played out the way it did.”
“It is geopolitics that … puts the world in this situation,” Ilona Kickbusch, from the Center for Global Health at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva, told AFP.
Since then, China has cleverly reformulated its version of events, praising its “extraordinary success” in curbing the pandemic within its borders and restarting its economy.
Beijing now says it will come to the rescue of poorer nations, promising cheap vaccines and casting doubt that the virus even originated in China.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently repeated the unproven claim that “the pandemic probably started in various parts of the world.”
If politics and an unprecedented health crisis continue to merge, experts fear deeper losses in the fight against a pandemic that knows no borders.
“There is this feeling of a world in disorder,” Kickbusch said. “If you lose confidence in global health, that will make it so difficult to cooperate.”
In that spirit, the WHO has said that its international experts are expected to “augment, rather than duplicate, ongoing or existing efforts” during their upcoming visit to China, meaning it will not probe research already provided by local scientists.
“I’m not optimistic. The trail is now cold,” Professor Gregory Gray of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University said of the likelihood that foreign experts will trace the animal origin of the virus.
But the journey may not be entirely in vain, he stressed: It may lay the foundation for “sustainable surveillance” for when future virus outbreaks occur.
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