WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed
his dismay at the move and said he had called on China to allow the team in.
“I’m very disappointed with this news, given that two
members have already begun their journeys, and others were not able to travel
at the last minute,” he said.
“But I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials.
And I have once again made made it clear that the mission is a priority for WHO
and the international team.”
The WHO has been attempting to send in the team of global
experts from a number of countries for some months. It has been talking with
Chinese officials since July. Scientists have long said it is essential to find
out how the virus jumped species into humans.
The expedition to China was heading to Wuhan to investigate
the earliest cases. It was not intending to probe claims that the virus
originated in a Chinese lab, which have been dismissed by most scientists.
The mission has been criticised by the US, where the
outgoing president, Donald Trump, has categorically blamed the Chinese for the
pandemic.
Garrett Grigsby, of the US Department of Health and Human
Services, said in November the investigation appeared to be “inconsistent” with
the WHO’s mandate.
‘Transparent’
“Understanding the origins of Covid-19 through a transparent
and inclusive investigation is what must be done to meet the mandate.”
Dr Mike Ryan, an Irish-born offcial at the WHO, said the
team had been working very closely with Chinese colleagues when planning the
trip.
“We were all operating on the understanding the team will
begin deployment today [Tuesday],” he said.
Two members of the team, who had a long distance to travel,
had begun their journeys, he said, but it had become clear that their visas had
not been approved by the Chinese authorities.
“We did not want to put people in the air unnecessarily if
there wasn’t a guarantee of their arrival in China being successful,” said Dr
Ryan. “Dr Tedros has taken immediate action and has spoken with senior Chinese
officials and has fully impressed upon them the absolute critical nature of
this.”
The team hoped it was “just a logistical and bureaucratic
issue that can be resolved very quickly”. One of the two colleagues who were on
their way had gone back, while the other was remaining in a third country in
transit.
“This is frustrating and, as the director general said,
disappointing. That disappointment has been expressed very clearly by Dr Tedros
directly to our counterparts in China. We trust that in good faith, we can
solve these issues in the coming hours and recommence the deployment of the
team as urgently as possible,” said Dr Ryan.
Ilona Kickbusch, the founding director and chair of the
Global Health Centre in Geneva, said geopolitics had got in the way of
countries joining together to defeat the coronavirus pandemic and the
hostilities that had been generated could now get in the way of finding out how
it began.
“I think it will be incredibly difficult to be able to find
the origin of the virus, because so much time has passed,” Ms Kickbusch said.
Come together
The world managed to come together to eradicate smallpox at
the height of the cold war, she pointed out. Even when Sars, another
coronavirus, surfaced in China and caused havoc between 2002 and 2003, the
global reaction had been one of cooperation and a push for more transparency.
Back then, Beijing had acknowledged it had made mistakes,
reorganised its health ministry and created the Chinese Centre for Disease
Control and Prevention. Other countries had given it the benefit of the doubt
and called for more cooperation.
“Sars actually led to China [understanding] that they needed
to be much more integrated into the [global] system,” Ms Kickbusch said. “It
was a period of opening.”
But now, she said: “There is a closing of the mind, quite
clearly, on all sides.”
Before the crisis, geopolitical tensions had bled into the
global health response, she said, pointing to how the US-China trade war had
morphed into a “geopolitical blame game”.
As a result “China clamped down totally [and] the US did
what it did” and in the end “the whole world has suffered”. - Guardian
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