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Almost a year after doctors identified the first cases of a worrisome new disease in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the country appears to be stepping up a campaign to question the origins of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
State media have been reporting intensively on the coronavirus discovered in imported frozen food packaging, which is not considered a significant vector of infection elsewhere, and investigating possible cases of the disease found outside China’s borders prior to December 2019.
The official People’s diary The newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in Wuhan, central China.”
“Wuhan was the place where the coronavirus was first detected, but it was not the place where it originated,” he quoted Zeng Guang, former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, asked about state media reports that the virus originated outside of China, said only that it was important to distinguish between where Covid-19 was first detected and where it crossed the line. species barrier to infect humans.
“Although China was the first to report cases, it does not necessarily mean that the virus originated in China,” Zhao Lijian said at a briefing. “Tracing of origin is an ongoing process that can involve multiple countries and regions.”
Chinese scientists have even submitted an article for publication to the Lancet – although not yet peer-reviewed – which states that “Wuhan is not the place where person-to-person transmission of Sars-CoV-2 first occurred”, suggesting that the first case may have been in the “Indian subcontinent”.
Western scientists give little credence to claims that the virus originated outside of China. Michael Ryan, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) health emergencies program, said last week that it would be “highly speculative” to argue that the disease did not arise in China. “It is clear from a public health perspective that investigations begin where human cases arose,” he told a news conference in Geneva.
Covid reports circulating in Italy in autumn 2019, based on samples from a cancer unit, appear “weak,” said Professor Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “Serological data [from Italy] Most likely, it can be explained by cross-reactive antibodies directed against other coronaviruses. “In other words, the antibodies found in the cases in Italy had been activated in people who had been infected by different coronaviruses, not in those responsible for the Covid -19.
“What seems certain is that the first recorded cases of the disease occurred in China,” Stoye added. “So the virus is more likely to have originated in China.”
And while traces of coronavirus have been found in frozen food packaging, scientists believe it poses a very low risk of a disease that is now believed to be overwhelmingly transmitted via respiratory droplets.
A positive test “does not indicate an infectious virus, only that some sign of the virus is present on that surface,” Andrew Pekosz of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health told AP. “I have not seen convincing data that Sars-CoV-2 in food packaging poses a significant risk of infection.”
But as the human and economic cost of the pandemic rises, Beijing wishes to protect its reputation at home and abroad. Covid-19 has infected more than 60 million people and killed nearly 1.5 million.
Since recovering from the devastation of its own initial outbreak, China has tried to bolster its position abroad with medical help.
It is now also promoting several vaccines that it has in advanced stages of development as part of its contribution to the “global good”, offering help with the manufacture and financing of immunization campaigns. But resentment over Beijing’s role in triggering the pandemic may ultimately prove more difficult for China to address than the disease itself.
“China is still struggling to deal with the fact that it is held responsible for the ‘original sin’ of the outbreak, which undermines virtually every effort to save its image,” said Andrew Small, a China scholar and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, a group of US experts.
“The last few months have shown the catastrophic impact that the pandemic has had for China on international public opinion.”
He does not think there is any doubt in the minds of top Chinese leaders about the origin of the virus, and sees the focus on reporting on possible alternative origins as a propaganda campaign.
The reports fit an internal narrative of a strong China led by an efficient communist party. At the national level, Beijing has furthered its enormous success by virtually eradicating the disease and bringing life within its borders back to something close to normal. At the international level, China’s goals likely include introducing some doubts to the global audiences who are likely to believe it, making the basic facts a “contentious and politically sensitive issue” in relations with Beijing, Small said.
China’s questioning of the origin of the virus in Wuhan might be more credible if it were backing an independent investigation into the disease, but instead, authorities have repeatedly proven obstructive.
WHO researchers who visited Wuhan earlier this year were unable to visit the food market related to the initial outbreak. A new team is expected to head to China soon to build on the initial work of a Chinese team, but they do not have a travel date yet, and the WHO only says they will travel “in due course.”
Understanding the origins of Covid-19 is vital to efforts to prevent the next pandemic. Unfortunately, for now Beijing seems more focused on the question of who should be to blame for the disease, than understanding where it comes from.
“What we are seeing right now is indicative of where the Chinese government wants all of this to come from, and that place is certainly not an open and responsible effort to determine what went wrong and ensure that it never happens again,” Small said. .
