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TThe international mission of the World Health Organization to China to investigate the origins of Covid-19 will explore all avenues and does not seek to find “guilty” parties, a team member told the AFP news agency.
The researchers will head to China in January and to Wuhan, where the first cases were detected 12 months ago in the pandemic that swept the world, causing gigantic global health and economic crises.
“The meetings we’ve had so far with Chinese colleagues have been really productive and very good,” said Fabian Leendertz of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s central disease control body.
“My impression, at the moment, is that the Chinese, in the government, but also at the population level, are really interested in knowing what happened.”
Leendertz, 48, is an expert on zoonoses – infectious diseases that cross the species barrier – and is among 10 eminent scientists tasked with trying to find the origins of the new coronavirus and find out how it jumped. from animals to humans.
A year after the first cluster was detected in Wuhan, they will travel to China for the first time on a mission that is expected to last between five and six weeks, the first two in quarantine.
The 10 scientists will also be accompanied by Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO expert on food safety and zoonoses.
“This is not about finding a guilty country or guilty authority,” Leendertz said. “It’s about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future, to reduce the risk.”
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