WHO Wuhan team to begin long-delayed coronavirus investigation after eliminating quarantine

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Members of the 13-person international team will complete their two-week quarantine within the next 24 hours, traveling to a city that was once the center of the global epidemic but is now, a year later, largely back to normal. The scrutiny of the team’s work will be immense as they navigate what is likely to be a political minefield to find out how the virus that has shut down much of the world came about.

“The eyes of the world are focused on this, the opinions of the world are focused on this,” Dutch virologist and team member Marion Koopmans told CNN on Wednesday morning, as she prepared for one final series. of meetings before leaving his quarantine hotel.

“We are aware of it, there is no way around it. This is why we really try to stay focused, we are scientists, we are not politicians, we are trying to really look at it from one point. scientifically. ”

Part of that involves letting go of all preconceived notions about how the virus has evolved and spread, to look at what the evidence says and go from there, Koopmans said. The team has spent the past two weeks on video calls with each other and with Chinese scientists, “discussing what we know, what we don’t know.”

The demand for answers will be great, especially after the investigation itself has been repeatedly delayed, but Koopmans cautioned against being patient.

“I think we have to really manage the expectations, if you look at some of the previous quests about the origins of the epidemics, they took years to complete,” she said. “The first relatively easy studies have been done, have already been published.”

An earlier report by a WHO team in China, released in February 2020, found that “significant knowledge gaps remain” about the virus, although it endorsed previous findings that the virus appeared to originate from animals, with the first probable outbreak in a fish. market in Wuhan.

Political pressure

While the WHO team will try to ignore the political element of their work, this can prove difficult.

Last week, the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response said the WHO and China could have acted faster and with more force to contain the onset of the Covid-19 epidemic.
Several countries, most vocally the United States and Australia, have accused Beijing of downplaying the severity of the outbreak in its early stages and of preventing an effective response until it is too late. In particular, Wuhan officials have been accused of silencing whistleblowers and concealing evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus, in a replay of the 2003 SARS outbreak.

The WHO itself has also come under immense pressure, with then-US President Donald Trump claiming last year that it was a “puppet” of China and withdrawing funding from Washington for it. organization. Shortly after his inauguration, President Joe Biden rescinded this order.

As China brought the pandemic under control nationally, unlike the ongoing chaos in the United States and much of Europe, Beijing has begun to forcefully reject any accusation of blame, advancing alternative theories – and unfounded – on origin. pandemic, including plots regarding a US military germ lab.
In Geneva last week, the head of the US delegation to the WHO called on China to allow the Wuhan team to have access to “caregivers, former patients and laboratory workers”, and to share all the scientific studies on animal, human and environmental samples taken from a market in Wuhan, Reuters reported.

“We have a solemn duty to ensure that this critical inquiry is credible and conducted in an objective and transparent manner,” said US Representative Garrett Grigsby, triggering a rebuke from the Chinese delegation, which accused him of “political pressure” .

A woman wears a protective mask as she visits an exhibition in Wuhan, China, on the city's fight against the coronavirus on January 26, 2021.

Hard work

A year after Wuhan entered the lockdown, after the city was repeatedly cleaned and disinfected to remove all traces of the virus, there is skepticism about what the investigative team will be able to do. discover.

“It is very difficult for anyone to find out the cause,” said Jin Dongyan, professor of virology at the University of Hong Kong. “It would be very difficult now to get first-line evidence to investigate the origin of SARS-COV-2 and the index cases of Covid-19. It is really difficult. And I doubt these international experts can find anything. I’m not very optimistic. “

The extent to which Chinese authorities are willing to cooperate is unclear, especially as even senior health officials have begun to question whether the virus originated in Wuhan, advancing the ‘multiple origins’ theory. Which was first issued by the country’s propaganda outlets in an apparent attempt to deflect blame from the initial handling of the pandemic.

Yanzhong Huang, senior researcher for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the success of the WHO teams’ trip depends to a large extent on the government’s willingness to be cooperative and accommodating in terms of sharing responsibility. research, allow them to access places of interest, to talk to the people they want to talk to. “

“The main problem is that this issue itself has been so politicized, it is really difficult to conduct an independent, transparent and thorough investigation,” Huang said, adding that “maybe international society should lower its expectations as well, to have a more realistic understanding of what this trip entails, especially since they plan to wrap up the study in a few months, you really shouldn’t expect anything magical. ”

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