COVID CORNER
The WHO provides China with a PR coup, while Dorset Knob throwers are cancelled
WHO INVESTIGATORS BACK BEIJING
The Chinese government’s insistence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes the Covid-19 group of illnesses) didn’t originate from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology laboratory has received backing from the World Health Organisation (WHO), whose investigative team have concluded their fact-finding mission, calling for “no further study into that theory”, despite some evidence from US and other intelligence agencies to the contrary.
At the outset of their mission, the WHO team were criticised when it was announced that the Wuhan lab was to be off-limits. In fact, the investigators, who stayed in China for one month, were permitted to examine the Institute of Virology – for a period of under four hours. They reported meeting with Chinese scientists there, including Shi Zhengli, one of China’s leading experts on bat coronaviruses and deputy director of the Wuhan lab. It is not clear whether the WHO team were able to inspect the lab’s security measures to prevent accidental leakage and contamination. During their closely monitored visit to China, reporters were largely kept at arms’ length from the WHO experts, but snippets of their findings have emerged on Twitter and via interviews given by individuals. During their onemonth stay, two weeks were spent in quarantine and another two on fieldwork. They are reported to have spent several days inside their Wuhan hotel, receiving visits from Chinese officials but without venturing out into the city itself. Critics have also questioned the purpose of the team’s visit to a propaganda exhibition celebrating China’s recovery from the pandemic.
The group spent just one hour at the Wuhan seafood market where many of the first clusters of infections emerged, and which has been suggested as the source of the virus, it being posited that SARS-CoV-2 originated in bats and either jumped directly to humans due to the unsanitary conditions at the ‘wet market’ (with live as well as dead animals) or passed to humans via an intermediary creature such as the pangolin. But Beijing is now questioning that theory too, claiming that the virus may have been imported into the country from overseas, and then spread via frozen meat on sale at the Wuhan market. Chinese scientists have pointed to studies which, they claim, demonstrate the virus “can be carried longdistance on cold chain products”.
In addition to its conclusion that it was “extremely unlikely” the virus had leaked from the lab, the WHO is now calling for studies to examine whether SARS-CoV-2 was an import to China from elsewhere. Dr Peter Embarek, the WHO team’s leader, backed Chinese government assertions of there being no evidence of transmission “in Wuhan or elsewhere” in China before December 2019, although there is mounting evidence for the virus circulating globally months before that date. Dr Embarek admitted that his team had failed to establish where the virus came from, or how it had first jumped to humans.
The WHO’s findings will be regarded as a PR coup for Beijing, which has continued to advance theories that lay the blame for the pandemic elsewhere than China. But its report will also be used by its critics, who feared their investigation would be used to legitimise a whitewash by Beijing; there is strong evidence for a media shutdown of news of the pandemic in China, and of whistleblowers being silenced. D.Mail, 9 Feb 2021.