WHO’s Wuhan team ‘given full access’
A member of the World Health Organisation expert team investigating the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan says the Chinese side granted full access to all sites and personnel the team requested – a level of openness that even he hadn’t expected.
Peter Daszak said team members had submitted a deeply considered list of places and people to include in their investigation, and no objections were raised.
‘‘We’ve been to all the key places. Every place we asked to see, everyone we wanted to meet,’’ said the Britishborn zoologist, who is president of the NGO EcoHealth Alliance in New York City.
Daszak said the team had now concluded its site visits, and would spend the next few days trolling through data and consulting with Chinese experts before presenting a summary of its findings before leaving on Wednesday.
He said questions included what the first cases were; what was the link with animals; and what, if any, was the role of the so-called ‘‘cold chain’’ – the possibility that the virus was brought into China on packaging from imported frozen food, an unproven theory that China has long put forward.
The visit by the WHO team took months to negotiate, after China agreed to it amid massive international pressure at the World Health Assembly meeting last May. Beijing has continued
to deny calls for a strictly independent investigation.
Chinese authorities have kept a tight hold on information about the possible causes of the pandemic that has now sickened more than 105 million people and killed more than 2.2 million worldwide.
Daszak said the team was also given wide access when visiting hospitals that treated patients in the initial outbreak at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. The same level of access was given at
the Huanan Seafood Market, which was linked to early case clusters.
Daszak said the investigation by the team, composed of experts from 10 nations, was likely to take years to confirm the origins of the virus.
The virus is widely suspected to have originated in bats before being passed to humans through an intermediary species, possibly a wild animal such as a pangolin or bamboo rat, considered an exotic delicacy by some in China.