Members of the World Health Organisation (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic arrive at Wuhan.
Following many months of wrangling and repeated rebuffs, a World Health Organization (WHO) team touched down in China Thursday to begin an investigation of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has so far sickened 92 million people around the world, killed almost 2 million, and derailed the global economy.
The team arrived in the central city of Wuhan—where the
coronavirus was first identified in December 2019—amid China’s worst resurgence
of COVID-19 for almost six months. There were 115 new confirmed cases on
Wednesday, most near Beijing.
AP reports that the “global team of researchers” consists of
10 members from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia,
the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam, and adds they will have to complete two
weeks of quarantine like all other other arrivals in China.
Earlier this month, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus expressed “disappointment” that repeated requests for investigators
to visit China earlier were declined due to what Beijing claimed were
administrative issues. A question mark continues to hang over Chinese
officials, whose desire to uncover the truth of the pandemic looks increasingly
clouded by political concerns and who may have limited willingness to allow the
team to gather its own evidence.
“If that is the case, then there may be very little point
actually being physically on the ground,” says Adam Kamradt-Scott, an associate
professor specializing in global health security at the University of Sydney.
“Any information is going to be highly vetted by Chinese authorities.”
Neither is it clear if the team will be visiting the Wuhan
Institute of Virology—the research facility that has been accused, without
evidence, of accidentally releasing the virus by some U.S. politicians. The
institute does not appear to be mentioned in the fact-finding mission’s terms
of reference, but one expert told AP that a “scientific audit” of the
institute’s safety protocols would be considered “routine.”
The origins of the pandemic
In an ideal scenario, international investigators would have
been dispatched within 24 hours of the outbreak to interview clinicians and
patients and to collect samples. In Wuhan, however, the Chinese authorities
sanitized the Huanan Seafood Market—where the first cluster of cases was
identified—before human-to-human transmission was belatedly confirmed.
One year on, the focus will be on talking to medical staff
and clinicians involved in treating patients, parsing medical records, and
examining data around the timeline of admissions to determine whether any other
cases could retrospectively be identified as COVID-19. Serological testing on
frozen blood samples or plasma could also determine how far back coronavirus
antibodies were in the human population.
“Ideally, the WHO team should have unfettered access to talk
to whoever they identify as being relevant,” says Kamradt-Scott. …………
Unfortunately, the origins of the pandemic have become
highly politicized by both Beijing and Washington, with outgoing U.S. president
Donald Trump using terms like “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” to deflect from his
own bungling response to the crisis. (On Tuesday, the U.S. suffered a daily
record of 4,327 COVID-19 deaths.).
In China, too, officials are scrambling to deflect blame. Universities
have been banned from publishing anything that suggests the virus originated in
China, according to directives seen by source. Some researchers believe the
virus may have originated in Asian bats, but according to documents obtained by
AP, scientists investigating caves inhabited by bats in southern China have
been ordered not to publish any data or research without the approval of top
cadres. Journalists who have visited the caves have met with official
resistance.
Media has also been amplifying and twisting research to
suggest that the origins of the virus lie elsewhere. In November 2020, a study
by the National Cancer Institute of Milan, which indicated that coronavirus
antibodies were present in the Italian population as early as September 2019,
was widely promoted by Chinese state media as evidence the outbreak began in
Europe.
“It is enough to prove that the coronavirus did not
originate in China!” posted one Weibo user to an article on the study published
by state broadcaster CCTV, summing up the belief of many.
The Milan study, which reexamined blood samples of cancer
patients for COVID-19 antibodies, found that SARS-CoV-2 virus—the virus that
causes COVID-19—was circulating asymptomatically for months before Italy’s
infections hit their first crisis point in April 2020.
Earlier coronaviruses tended to jump between animals and
humans for some time before evolving the ability to go from human to human. For
example, SARS antibodies were found to be present in people in Hong Kong two
years before the 2003-4 pandemic that claimed at least 774 lives globally.
Scientists say determining how and when the initial leap occurred in the case
of SARS-CoV-2 is vital to preventing a recurrence of this disease and
mitigating similar outbreaks in the future.
A source, believes it is likely that the virus “had been
circulating previously, or at least it had started circulating in a small
community somewhere, but we lacked the diagnostic tools to detect it.”
As the WHO team finally begins its mission, the question on
many people’s minds is whether or not that “small community” was in China.