A joint WHO-Chinese investigation report has ruled out that the New crown outbreak may have stemmed from a leak at the Wuhan Virus Institute. However, the organization’s director-general, Tan Desai, on Tuesday solemnly called for a new investigation into whether a leak from the Wuhan Virus Institute triggered the outbreak, publicly criticizing China for not providing international experts with enough information. Tandezai’s performance was surprising !
The WHO has been accused of caving in to Beijing, and its leader, Tandezai, has been blamed for it. The world cannot forget the photo of Tandezai in the Great Hall of the Chinese People on January 28 last year, when China finally admitted publicly that human-to-human transmission had occurred, the outbreak in Wuhan was out of control, and Zhongnanhai ordered a blockade of most of the 12 million people living there.
The photo is a snapshot, and perhaps not to be read too much. But the ensuing conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to reinforce the impression that Mr. Director General is bowing down to Beijing’s power, and that photo seems to be the proof. That photo went around the world with the new crown pandemic.
It was supposed to be a major meeting for human health – one of the top representatives of the International Health Organization and one of the top leaders of the 1.4 billion people in the countries where the Epidemic broke out. The result of the meeting only served the vanity of both sides, as Tandezai was received by Xi like a head of state, and Xi used Tandezai to decorate the image of a leader in the fight against the epidemic. In fact, the meeting was a failure for the International Health Organization. Tan Desai got nothing from Beijing.
The New Crown outbreak broke out and spread in Wuhan, and officials publicly acknowledged as late as January 20, four weeks later, that the epidemic had gotten so out of control that Wuhan was forced into a lockdown on January 23, but the New Crown virus had already spread throughout China and around the world with the flow of people through this north-south thoroughfare.
On March 8, the Journal of Thoracic Disease published a study by Chinese scientist Zhong Nanshan’s team, who found through model testing that if isolation and control measures had been taken five days earlier, the number of people infected with New Coronavirus in Wuhan could have been reduced by more than half. Is it possible to reason that if the quarantine measures were delayed by 5 days, the outbreak in China would have been 3 times larger, but if the quarantine measures were taken 5 days earlier, the number of infections would have been 1 in 3. If the epidemic had been contained from upstream, the international community, located downstream, might not have faced the violent impact of a pandemic as it did later, and might have been able to save countless lives?
But when Xi Jinping met with Tan Desai, he made no apology for the Chinese authorities’ initial concealment of the epidemic and delay in fighting it, but suddenly changed his tune and said, “I have been personally directing and deploying” the fight against the epidemic, and Xi Jinping had little interest in fighting the epidemic initially, as evidenced by his making Li Keqiang head of the national leading group for fighting the epidemic. Xi Jinping headed almost all the major leading groups, but he did not head this one.
When Tandezai came to Beijing on the eve of the pandemic, the Communist Party leaders seemed to realize that the WHO leader, despite his limited power, had a lot to say when the epidemic was in full swing. By meeting with Tandezai, Xi seized the opportunity to show the world that he was leading China’s fight against the epidemic, while taking the opportunity to play down criticism that the epidemic was being hidden and not transparent, especially not to give the impression that the epidemic was spread because of poor governance by the Chinese authorities.
Tan Desai, as the top representative of the International Health Organization, was sarcastically called “Secretary Tan” by netizens on that occasion, and he was reluctantly or unwillingly used by the Chinese side. In his meeting with Xi, Tan praised China’s ability to fight the epidemic, and Xinhua reported that Tan appreciated “President Xi Jinping’s personal command and deployment, demonstrating excellent leadership”, adding that “the speed and scale of China’s actions are rare in the world, showing China’s speed, scale and efficiency. We highly appreciate the speed, scale and efficiency of China’s actions. This is the strength of the Chinese system, and the relevant experience is worth learning from other countries.”
Against the official WHO website, Tandse said far less vociferously than the official media wrote, stating, “We appreciate the importance China has given to this outbreak, in particular the commitment of its senior leadership and the transparency it has shown in sharing virus data and genetic sequences.” And another paragraph: “The WHO delegation highly commended China’s actions in responding to the outbreak, its speed in identifying the virus and its openness in sharing information with WHO and other countries.”
The biggest criticism from the outside world is that China is not transparent-human-to-human transmission was concealed for a long Time, and his straightforward appreciation left the outside world with the impression that the WHO was completely at ease with China’s fight against the epidemic, and that Tan Desai had not raised a single issue, and Tan Desai’s performance disappointed the world. Yet this is the moment when the New Guinea virus is spreading to the world, and the WHO under Tandezai’s leadership refuses to declare the New Guinea epidemic a global health emergency, ringing the alarm bell. According to a Jan. 28 report in France’s Le Monde, the WHO was forced to concede after China’s representative in Geneva tried to prevent the declaration of a global health emergency.
As the world became more and more mired in the epidemic and unable to extricate itself, the more criticism Tandezai’s performance in China received, and later there were suspicions that WHO was being used as a gun for Beijing, and the U.S. Trump administration simply accused WHO of being a puppet of China, and the U.S. and withdrew from WHO. Perhaps these accusations went a bit too far, but the performance of the WHO under Tandezai on the eve of a global pandemic left a very poor impression on the world.
As time went on, the blame for the WHO subsided slightly with China’s dumping behavior and arrogance after the epidemic was largely contained and the botched performance of the War Wolf diplomats overseas. The view of Walter Stevens, the European Union’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, was that the main problem was the lack of weight of the WHO itself, and “I don’t agree with the idea that China has complete control of the WHO.”
WHO later repeatedly offered to go to the Wuhan site to investigate the source of the new crown until a year after the Wuhan outbreak, when the Chinese side allowed international experts to go to the site, and it had to be a joint investigation by WHO and the Chinese side, with some international experts involved in the investigation disclosing that they had no access to more than the original material and samples, and that what they saw was what the Chinese side had already prepared to show them.
The joint investigation between WHO experts and China, which lasted four weeks, ended on Feb. 9 of this year, at which it was suggested that the possibility of animal-to-human transmission was the most likely, and the possibility of cold meat chain transmission, as claimed by China, was not denied, but the possibility of laboratory leakage was considered “the least likely”, and the experts ruled out studying this possibility.
Tandse was refreshingly open-minded when he answered questions from reporters in Geneva on 11 November. He said that “all hypotheses about the origin of the virus need to be further studied”. All hypotheses, of course, including the hypothesis of whether the Wuhan laboratory transmitted the new coronavirus.
Biden‘s U.S. has returned to the WHO, and Tandse’s change of heart is impressive. The joint investigation had already ruled out the possibility that the Wuhan virus had leaked, deeming that hypothesis “extremely unlikely. But Tandezai was very clear on March 30, when he called for a new, in-depth investigation by international experts into the hypothesis of a Wuhan virus leak at a press conference that was widely watched. He also criticized the Chinese side for not providing enough information when international experts went to China to investigate. The experts told him that it was extremely difficult to get information from the Chinese side.
AFP reported that it was “extremely rare” for the WHO leader to publicly criticize a Chinese co-responsible investigation into the traceability of a new coronavirus.
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