The WHO expert team’s mission to China to investigate the origins of the new coronavirus Wuhan pneumonia was highly sensitive and the dates were kept secret. Authorities were nervous enough to sentence Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist who reported on the Wuhan outbreak, to four years in prison. Foreign Minister Wang Yi set the tone ahead of time, declaring that the New Coronavirus had broken out simultaneously in several places around the world.
More than a year after the emergence of the new coronavirus outbreak, a WHO team is finally expected to arrive in China to investigate the source of the outbreak, according to AFP. But at this point, experts say they are not optimistic about finding the first traces of the infection.
The visit of the 10 WHO experts from 10 countries is highly sensitive for the Chinese regime, which is eager to rule out any responsibility for an outbreak that has killed more than 1.8 million people worldwide.
AFP said the authorities in Beijing were so nervous that the experts’ visit was carried out as if they were on a secret mission, without even announcing the date. The WHO only said it was in the first week of January.
One sign that the Communist authorities are nervous was the sentencing last week of Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist who had covered the epidemic in Wuhan, to four years in prison.
While Beijing has managed to eradicate the disease from its soil, it has been unable to stop U.S. President Donald Trump from regularly accusing Beijing of spreading the “China virus” around the world – even accusing it of letting the virus escape from a virus lab in the country’s central city of Wuhan at the end of 2019.
Wang Yi: Simultaneous Outbreaks in Multiple Countries
Meanwhile, Chinese authorities wasted no time in questioning the virus’ Chinese origin. While Chinese authorities initially blamed a market in Wuhan that sells live animals as the source of the virus, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said over the weekend, “More and more studies show that the New Crown outbreak is likely to break out simultaneously in Xu places around the world.”
Due to the outbreak, this international team of experts will need to be quarantined for two weeks after arriving in Beijing, and then they will have 3-4 weeks left to investigate. It is estimated that the team will probably go to Wuhan around Jan. 20, almost a year after the metropolis of 11 million inhabitants was quarantined.
AFP quoted some observers as speculating that Beijing chose January 20 to allow international experts into Wuhan to investigate, possibly to wait for Donald Trump to leave the White House so as not to give the impression of caving in to Republican President Donald Trump’s demands.
Trump has repeatedly called for an international investigation into the source of the virus, and then Australia made that request as well —- so the country has come under Chinese trade sanctions in recent months.
China’s delay in agreeing to an independent investigation has meant that researchers have struggled to find the first traces of the infection. I’m not optimistic,” said Gregory Gray, an infectious disease expert at Duke University in the United States. They’ll arrive after they’ve finished packing up.”
“It will be very difficult to find the source of the virus,” says Ilona Kikebush of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
Scientists generally agree that the original host of the virus was a bat, but the intermediate animal that left humans contaminated is not known.
The hypothesis that the virus was imported through frozen food has been increasingly put forward in the Chinese media, a theory rejected by the WHO.
No “culprit”
For the WHO, which has been accused by the Trump administration of being pro-Beijing, there is no doubt that its team of experts is free to investigate in China, although Beijing has still not confirmed that Wuhan is indeed on the schedule for the visit.
That team of experts will travel to Wuhan, the target of the mission, according to Michael Ryan, head of health emergencies at the Geneva-based WHO, who said in mid-December. He added, “We will work with Chinese colleagues who will not (……) be supervised by Chinese officials.”
The WHO expert team going to China consists of 10 scientists from Denmark, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, Russia, Vietnam, Germany, the United States, Qatar and Japan. They were recognized in different areas of expertise.
One of the members of the WHO investigation team, Ryan Deutz of the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, told AFP that “our goal is not to designate a guilty country or authority, but to understand what happened in order to prevent it from happening again.”
For his part, Professor Gray Gray, an expert on infectious diseases at Duke University, warned that if the investigation is blocked by the authorities, “it will have a negative impact on the political and scientific reputation of China.”
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