Chinese officials are hailing a visit by a team of experts sent to Beijing by the World Health Organization to investigate the source of the coronavirus as evidence that the country is a responsible and transparent global power. But the WHO investigation is likely to take many months and could face delays.
For starters, there are logistical headaches. China has placed the advanced team of experts who are laying the groundwork for a broader investigation under a standard 14-day quarantine, forcing them to do some of their remote detective work.
“Obviously, the arrival and quarantine of people and working remotely is not the ideal way to work, but we fully respect established risk management procedures,” said Mike Ryan, WHO chief emergency response officer, at a press conference on Friday. . He said it would be weeks before a full team could visit China.
The WHO investigation comes as China faces a strong global reaction, including from the United States, to minimize and not contain the virus, which emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December.
For weeks, China had fiercely resisted demands from other nations to allow independent researchers on its soil to study the origin of the pathogen. Beijing has also tried to deflect blame by suggesting, without evidence, that the virus could have originated elsewhere.
Now, officials announce Beijing’s response to the outbreak as a model for the world and are attacking the United States for “shirking its responsibilities” in the global fight against Covid-19.
The Trump administration, which has repeatedly tried to distract itself from its ineffective response to the pandemic, has criticized the WHO investigation. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said he hoped it would be a “completely whitewashed investigation.”
With relations between China and western countries rapidly deteriorating due to military, technological, trade and human rights concerns, experts fear that Beijing will seek to limit the scope of the investigation so as not to embarrass the government.
“The whole political landscape is not conducive to conducting impartial scientific research,” said Wang Linfa, a virologist in Singapore who participated in a similar WHO study in China during the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003. “I am sorry for the team members. “
The Chinese government initially covered the SARS outbreak, but Wang said he was eager to cooperate with international experts later. This time, he said, the WHO research is likely to be largely symbolic because the broader geopolitical climate could make Chinese experts unwilling to share valuable research.
Chinese authorities have provided little data on samples taken by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in December at the Huanan Seafood Market, an expanding market in Wuhan that sold game meat and live animals, where many of the first reported infections. Since then, the market has been closed and scrubbed.
The WHO research focuses on the question of how the disease jumped into humans from animals. The advanced team is comprised of an animal health expert as well as an epidemiologist. The team members, who arrived in mid-July, have not yet been identified and have not spoken publicly.
Dr. Ryan said Friday that the health organization was “very pleased with the collaboration on the ground.” He said earlier this month that the experts would not do field investigations, but would meet with Chinese officials and researchers to review the available data and describe the scope of the investigation.
For months, China and the United States have been embroiled in a political fight over the virus, with each accusing the other of intentionally unleashing the virus around the world.
Despite unfounded conspiracy theories that the virus was created by man, experts say Covid-19 is caused by a coronavirus that almost certainly originated naturally from animals, likely bats.
But they don’t know where it came from, what the exact chain of transmission is, and how many times contagion to humans from animals has occurred. For a time, pangolins were thought to be a possible intermediate host. A more recent analysis has shown that while they may have played a role in the development of the virus, there is no evidence that they were the immediate source.
While the Chinese government has said it welcomes an investigation, officials have yet to provide details about their own efforts to trace the origins of the virus. Research on the matter in several cases has been blocked or delayed, Chinese scientists say.
Chinese officials have tried to rethink the WHO visit as a sign of China’s confidence and strength, especially compared to the United States, making the dubious claim that China requested it for the first time. (Countries like Australia had lobbied for such an investigation.) Reports in the state media have described the WHO visit as a reflection of China’s “open attitude”.
“It is our contribution to global cooperation in public health as an important responsible country,” Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said this month at a press conference.
Mr. Zhao asked the United States to allow a similar investigation, despite the fact that there is no evidence that the virus originated in the United States. He criticized the United States for going ahead with plans to withdraw from the WHO over concern that the health agency is too close to China.
“The United States has been shirking its own responsibilities and undermining global solidarity in the fight against the virus by declaring its departure from the WHO, politicizing issues related to the pandemic and smearing others,” he said.
Chinese officials and experts have continued to ask WHO to expand its analysis to include other countries.
Wang Guangfa, a top government health adviser, has said that the WHO must also go to Spain. Mr. Wang, speaking this month with The Global Times, a Chinese nationalist tabloid, cited an unpublished study by researchers at the University of Barcelona that suggested the virus was present in Spain’s sewage in March 2019. Independent experts They have said the study was flawed and that other lines of evidence strongly suggest that the virus broke out in China late last year.
WHO officials have said Wuhan is the best starting point to analyze the animal origin of the virus because it was where the first groups of the outbreak in humans emerged. But they also remained open to other lines of study.
“We have to keep an open mind,” said Dr. Ryan at a press conference this month. “Science must remain open to all possibilities.”
The WHO investigation could take months, if not longer. It took several years for scientists to conclude that horseshoe bats were the most likely hosts in the wild for the coronavirus that caused SARS in 2002. Prior to that, researchers had identified masked palm civets as one of the main intermediate hosts after that the virus was identified in several civets that were sold in the Guangdong markets.
The research also offers an opportunity for WHO to rehabilitate its own image. While the agency has been praised for its efforts to coordinate vaccine treatment and development, it has also come under fire for trusting China too much and for failing to pressure Chinese health officials on their first missteps.
The organization depends on its member states for information, and publicly challenging those countries could put it at risk of being cut off from the data it needs to operate and respond quickly to outbreaks.
Critics say the WHO’s tendency to praise its member states makes it easy for governments, including China, to co-opt the agency for propaganda purposes.
Yanzhong Huang, a public health expert in China at the Council on Foreign Relations, said both China and the WHO faced increasing pressure for a comprehensive review of what happened, but it was unclear if they could comply.
He noted that it was still uncertain whether the team of experts who could visit China would include representatives of countries that had reprimanded it, including the United States and Australia, and whether they would have full access to records, sites and laboratories.
“Simply put,” he said, “it is unclear whether a thorough and objective investigation is possible.”
