China’s lack of transparency a profound problem
They toured a propaganda exhibit celebrating China’s containment of and recovery from COVID-19.
They inspected a seafood market where it was previously believed the coronavirus might have jumped from animals to humans — although there is still no evidence that wildlife had been sold there. In any event, the Huanan Seafood market is empty, closed down more than a year ago.
They visited the Hubei Provincial Centre for Disease Control and a hospital where the earliest patients for what was then described as an atypical pneumonia were treated.
And maybe, either Wednesday or later in the week, they will actually meet the renowned “Bat Woman,” Shi Zhengli, virus-hunter extraordinaire, at her Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, a biosafety level 4 facility where risky but groundbreaking research is conducted. Shi — acclaimed for discovering that SARS was caused by a virus that probably came from a species of bats in a Yunnan cave — has spent more than a year fending off accusations that the novel coronavirus had somehow leaked from her lab, not far distant from a wet market that drew suspicion. Not an iota proof of that either. “Guarantee on my life,” Shi has said.
Yes indeed, enjoying quite the field trip, that World Health Organization-led team of scientific experts investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus pandemic at ground zero. If, in fact, Wuhan is ground zero, which is widely surmised but never definitively confirmed. Thirteen months since China, on New Year’s Eve, 2019, informed WHO about “cases of pneumonia of unknown aetiology detected in Wuhan City.” And only now, after emerging from 14-day quarantine, has the team been allowed into the country to go about its research mission.
Firmly orchestrated and restricted, of course. Although there has been limited information disclosed by team members, in real time, multiple reports claim Chinese authorities continue to aggressively promote the theory — to the WHO team as well — that SARS-CoV-2 was introduced into the country from outside, possibly via frozen seafood tainted with the virus, a weak hypothesis roundly rejected by international scientists and agencies. Conjecture based on nothing more than the ardent wish to evade global blame. As, indeed, the global pandemic which has infected, as of Tuesday, 103,841,974 people (as per Johns Hopkins University tracking), shouldn’t be about finger-pointing. We’re well beyond that. Though, obviously, the why and how of it is crucial to learn.
And of course we must not call it the China virus, as the silly former American president insisted on doing, although emergent strains are known as the U.K. variant, the South African variant and the Brazil variant. The Ebola virus was named for the Ebola River in the Congo close to the village where the first known victim, a teacher, was identified in 1976. Nobody made a fuss about racist neologism.
China is a world powerhouse, however, and nobody wants to get on the bad side of a nation that can crush you like a bug. That includes WHO, lambasted from the start of the pandemic for cowering before Beijing. Barely a peep out of WHO HQ in Geneva when it was revealed that it took a week before Chinese researchers published the virus’ draft genome sequencing last Jan. 11.
A week is a long time for a galloping pandemic. The first case outside China was reported in Thailand on Jan. 13, 2020. WHO declared a global health emergency on Jan. 30.
In November, an investigation by the New York Times argued that the WHO, even as it extolled China for its muscular COVID containment rules — forcing infected people into fever shacks, literally nailing shut doors of residences with known contamination, with civilians inside, as Wuhan was plunged into hermetically sealed lockdown — allowed Beijing to set the agenda.
In fact, an advance WHO team was allowed into Wuhan last February, led by Canadian epidemiologist Dr. Bruce Aylward, former WHO assistant director general. At a press conference upon his return to Geneva, Aylward heaped praise on China for quick and thorough mobilization against the pandemic. “What China demonstrates is that this one is not beyond control. It’s a function of your response.” The infectious disease specialist had come away from Hubei province convinced the virus was not spreading as rapaciously as feared.
What Aylward didn’t say, what WHO didn’t disclose, was that, contrary to what the agency was saying publicly, it had quietly negotiated terms that sidelined its own experts. They were not permitted to question China’s initial response or even visit the Wuhan wet market where it appeared the outbreak had originated. WHO, as the Times reports, repeatedly declined requests by multiple governments to divulge the investigation terms to which it had agreed.
So, no, the WHO doesn’t have a virtuous record on COVID-19, the timeline punctuated by a slew of key reversals, misleading information and contradictory data, from mask wearing (no/yes) through person to person transmission (no/yes), to no-risk from asymptomatic carriers (no/yes), to airborne transmission (no/yes).
Second time around factfinding, one might reasonably wonder what the WHO hopes to find in Potemkin Wuhan, on a tight leash and with so much of the forensic evidence scrubbed off. The team hasn’t been allowed to meet with family members of those who’ve died of COVID-19 and who very much want to speak with the foreign investigators. Families say they are being monitored and silenced by local authorities, their postings on social media erased.
It’s the China way of doing things, averse as Beijing is to scrutiny from outside. Or inside, for that matter; recall the whistle-blowing doctor who first raised the alarm in a chat group in December 2019, about the strange infection he was seeing — sternly reprimanded, arrested and detained by authorities for “making untrue comments” and “severely disturbing social order.” Dr. Li Wenliang himself succumbed to COVID not long after.
Skepticism about this mission’s merits has provoked sharp criticism from many quarters, some declaring they won’t accept the WHO report when it’s published. That triggered a furious pushback at a press conference earlier this week by Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO’s executive director, health emergencies. “We are in the field with experts from 10 countries looking to find the answers,” said Ryan, who then proceeded to scold the critics. “If you have the answers, if you think you have some answers, please let us know.”
Ryan dismissed cynics who maintain any report produced under limitations, adhering to China’s sanitized itinerary, would be incomplete, likely misleading, and there is other intelligence available that may show different findings.
He asked how responsible — irresponsible — it is “to say you won’t accept a report even before it’s written? To say that you have intelligence that has not been provided?”
It should be pointed out that Ryan was responding to a journalist’s question that referenced new U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, hardly a conspiracy theorist.
Blinken had just put Beijing on notice in an interview on NBC News’ “Today,” wherein he accused China of falling short of its international obligations to provide information about the origins of the Wuhan outbreak. “There’s no doubt that especially when COVID-19 first hit, but even today, China is falling far short of the mark when it comes to providing the information necessary to the international community, making sure that experts have access to China.
“All of that lack of transparency, that lack of being forthcoming, is a profound problem.”
But the World Health Organization apparently can live with that, in its tripping-the-factsfandango excursion to source the origins of COVID-19.
Unlike the nearly 2.25 million people who already have died from it.