Exactly one year after the Wuhan outbreak, an international team of experts on a mission to China to investigate the source of the new crown outbreak has finally hit the road after repeated requests from the WHO, but it’s not going well. The experts are on their way, but so far have not received the permission they deserve, WHO Director General Denis Tan said Tuesday. In a rare move, Tandse said, “It’s disappointing.”
The investigation has been going on for a full year, and until Tuesday, only two of the experts departed for China, with the other members not knowing until the last minute that they could not make the trip. Tandse said, “I just learned today that the Chinese chief has not completed the necessary paperwork for the expert mission to arrive in China.” He spoke with senior Chinese officials and again made clear that this was a major mission for the WHO international mission, Tandse said.
What went wrong? Ryan, the executive director of the World health Organization’s emergency medical program, who was standing next to Tandse, added: visas! He hoped it was just a simple bureaucratic problem caused by a technical issue. With such a “minor problem”, the two experts already on the road had to turn back, and some others were on standby in a third country.
The WHO repeatedly wanted an international mission to China, and a delegation sent in July spent only three weeks in Beijing, reportedly “preparing” but with nothing to do. When the team members returned, they said they had to go home because they could not get near Wuhan. Now, Beijing has finally agreed to go, with a technical problem at the end.
This seems to portend something ominous, as international public opinion has recently been both very hopeful and at the same time unimpressed, even pessimistic, about this WHO trip to China. The New York Times previously revealed that a key condition for Beijing’s agreement to an international expert mission to China to investigate the source of New Crown was that key parts of the investigation would be handled by Chinese experts.
Wuhan is the site of the 2019 New Crown outbreak, and Shi Zhengli’s team at the P4 Research Laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has received much attention from the scientific community for extracting samples of multiple coronaviruses from the Yunnan Bat Cave, told a BBC reporter in a recent interview that Shi herself said that as an individual she would welcome any kind of visit, but on the possibility of allowing international experts to see her lab data and records, she said It was not up to her to decide on a specific program. As expected, the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research later issued a statement saying that Shi Zhengli’s statement did not represent the institute.
Identifying the source of the new crown virus is not a matter of finding the guilty party; it is a matter of whether humanity can effectively prevent future virus pandemics. Since the Chinese side was slightly relieved from the weight of the New Crown epidemic, it began making claims in late February that the outbreak had broken out in Wuhan and that the source was unknown, followed by a string of dumping, the worst of which was when Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian in March went so far as to accuse U.S. military personnel of bringing the virus with them when they traveled to Wuhan for the World Military Games in November 2019, his conspiracy theory statement triggering a huge diplomatic crisis.
The traceability of the new crown is important to the world and important to China, but the Chinese side has been incomprehensible. Since the beginning of winter, there have been local outbreaks in many places in China, including Tianjin, and the official traceability results, alleging a major link to the imported cold chain, and for a while many provinces and cities have blamed the newly discovered cases on foreign imports of cold meat or packaging, but the WHO has made it clear that so far there is no evidence to prove that frozen products or packaging of frozen products can transmit the new crown virus.
The statement made by Zhao Lijian’s chief before the WHO expert mission was ready to depart gave even less of a good sign, and before the traceability began, Beijing jumped to the forefront, with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi saying in a January 2 interview with the official media Xinhua News Agency and China Central Radio that “more and more studies show that the outbreak is likely to be a multi-point global outbreak”, Wang Yi’s statement was seen as an update of the dumping theory, which is incredible.
Wang Yi’s orientation is clear, his ministry members began a new round of dumping action. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters on Jan. 4: “As we all know, there are more and more clues and research reports pointing to a multi-point outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in multiple parts of the world in the second half of the previous year, and the timeline is still moving ahead.”
At least one clue, widely known to overseas media, is the abandoned copper mine known as Bat Cave in Tongguan Town, Mojiang County, Yunnan Province, where six workers who mined in a cave covered with bat guano more than seven years ago contracted “unexplained pneumonia” and four of them died. The symptoms were very similar to those of the 2019 New Coronavirus. More importantly, because of this odd pneumonia, Shih’s team made several trips to Yunnan to take samples from bats in the cave. After the New Crown outbreak more than seven years later, people wanted to know more about the relationship between the lung disease the six miners got and New Crown pneumonia, and the sampling operation of Shi Zhengli’s team, who collected nine coronaviruses and published only one, so where are the other eight now? Some researchers suspect that this bat cave may hide the key to cracking the source of New Crown.
But that cave is now so heavily guarded that no one can get near it. A team of journalists from the Associated Press, a BBC reporter, was blocked off from the road by police in plain clothes with cars when they tried to approach the bat cave in late November and early December.
Many observers believe that if Beijing is sincere, it should open up all the information, archives, and records of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research and allow overseas researchers to explore the secrets of the bat cave.
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