The WHO has once again faced difficulties from Beijing over sending experts into China to investigate the source of the new coronavirus, as the experts were told at the last minute that they had not been granted entry permits when they were due to depart. Beijing responded that the delay was “not just a visa issue.
One year after the outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, international health experts are expected to arrive in Beijing this week to begin their much-publicized mission to find the source of the new coronavirus. Wuhan, China, was the first city to have an outbreak of the virus in the pandemic and is therefore the focus area for this investigation.
The mission was highly sensitive and Beijing was adamantly opposed to it for a long time, fearing that Wuhan would be held accountable by the international community if it was identified as the source of the virus. Later, to ease international pressure, Chinese officials said they were in favor of the investigation but insisted that it be controlled by Chinese experts in China and asked the WHO to investigate not only China but also the United States, Italy, Iran and other countries with serious outbreaks.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a press conference on Wednesday (Jan. 6) that “necessary procedures need to be fulfilled and relevant specific arrangements made” to ensure that the international expert group’s work in China proceeds smoothly. “At present, the two sides are still in consultation on this,” she said.
In response to WHO’s question about China’s delay in issuing entry permits to the expert group, China’s Foreign Ministry said the problem is not limited to the visa issue, but also includes the date of arrival in China and some other details.
Hua Chunying explained that in addition to the visa issue, there is also the epidemic. She said, “At present, the global epidemic situation is still very serious, and China is also doing its best to prevent and control the epidemic at home, and the health and epidemic prevention departments and experts are fully engaged in the intense anti-epidemic work.”
Hua said that China and the WHO “may have some misunderstandings, but there is no need to over-interpret, we hope to determine the details as soon as possible.”
Just a day before Hua’s speech, WHO Director-General Tan Desai took a rare public stab at China. He said he was “disappointed” that Chinese officials had not yet given final approval for a team of experts to enter China to investigate the source of the new coronavirus.
Speaking at a news conference in Geneva, Tandse said the WHO had agreed with the Chinese government that members of the international scientific team would travel to China from their respective countries within the past 24 hours. But, Tandse said, “Today, we learned that Chinese officials have not yet finalized the necessary permits for this team to arrive in China.”
Tandse said, “I am very disappointed by this news as two members have already departed and some others were unable to board at the last minute.”
Tandse said he was consulting with Chinese authorities and made it clear to them that conducting an investigation into the source of the virus was a priority for WHO.
“We believe and hope that this is just a logistical and bureaucratic issue that can be resolved very quickly,” said Mike Ryan, WHO’s emergency program director.
In a bid to gain a voice in the source of the virus, it is clear that the Chinese government has recently stepped up its outreach momentum. In a recent media interview, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi claimed that “more and more studies show that the outbreak is likely to be a multi-point global outbreak in multiple places.”
Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s emergency program, has previously responded to this “global multipoint outbreak” claim, saying it was “too speculative.
Leaked internal WHO documents show that Chinese officials did not actively cooperate with the WHO in the early stages of the outbreak, as the Chinese Foreign Ministry said, by sharing information about the outbreak in a timely manner. The documents say the WHO learned of the human-to-human new crown outbreak in China through published papers by Chinese academics, not from a notification from the Chinese government.
The documents also show that the main reason why Tandse gave the impression of being unprincipled and accommodating, even accommodating, to the Beijing government was that it was tightly blocking information. In order to obtain information about the outbreak from the Chinese Communist Party, Tandezai had to bend over backwards to create a deliberate atmosphere of close ties with Beijing.
U.S. President Donald Trump was so disgusted by the WHO’s accommodation of Beijing that he decided categorically to withdraw from the WHO.
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