A relative of a Chinese New Crown pneumonia victim has asked to meet with a World health Organization expert group that visited Wuhan. He also said the team of experts should talk to the families of New Crown patients who have been suppressed by the Chinese government.
After months of negotiations, China approved the visit of the WHO expert team. The Chinese government did not indicate whether team members would be allowed to gather evidence or talk to families, saying only that the expert team could exchange views with Chinese scientists.
According to the Associated Press, the relative of the dead Newcastle pneumonia victim is Zhang Hai, whose father died of Newcastle pneumonia on Feb. 1 last year. I hope the WHO experts will not become a tool to spread lies,” he said. We have been searching endlessly for the truth. This is a criminal act and I don’t want the WHO to come to China to cover up these crimes.”
The WHO team arrived in Wuhan on Jan. 14 to begin investigating the source of the new coronavirus. The team is expected to begin field work later this week after a 14-day quarantine.
Zhang Hai, a Wuhan native who now lives in Shenzhen, has been organizing relatives of Chinese New Coronavirus patients to hold officials accountable.
Many are angry that the government downplayed the outbreak at the beginning of the Epidemic and are trying to file a lawsuit against the Wuhan government.
According to interviews with relatives of Zhang Hai and other patients, they are facing intense pressure from authorities to refrain from making public statements. Officials have reportedly dismissed the lawsuit and repeatedly interrogated Zhang Hai and others, and threatened to fire relatives of those who gave interviews to foreign media.
Zhang Hai said the relatives’ chat group was blocked shortly after the WHO panel arrived in Wuhan, and he accused the city of trying to silence them.
“Don’t pretend we don’t exist, you erased all our platforms, but we still want to let people know through the media that we haven’t given up,” he said.
The WHO said the visit to China was a scientific mission to investigate the origin of the virus, not to hold people accountable, and that “in-depth interviews and reviews” of early cases were necessary.
U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci told the World Economic Forum on Monday that the origins of the virus that has crippled the world remain unclear and that “it’s a big, scary black box.”
The arrival of the WHO mission has reignited a controversy over whether China was too slow to respond in the early days and thus caused the virus to spread globally. WHO officials have tried to cooperate more with China from the start, but with little success.
Recordings of internal WHO meetings obtained by the Associated Press show that while the WHO praised China in public, officials complained privately that they were not given enough information.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying insisted that China’s early handling of the outbreak bought Time to fight the epidemic. She said, “As the first country to raise the global alarm against the epidemic, China, faced with a new virus unknown to mankind before, even when information was not comprehensive at the time, made decisive decisions and insisted on early detection, early reporting, early isolation and early treatment, which bought time to fight the epidemic and reduced infections and deaths. Such an achievement has been recognized by scientists and medical experts from all countries in the world.”
Keiji Fukuda, a professor at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health, called the visit an “image-building mission,” with China eager to show transparency and the WHO eager to show it is taking action.
Both China and the WHO want to score some points, but it all depends on what the team of experts can access,” he said. Can they really ask the questions they want to ask?”
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