World Health Organisation experts visit Beijing to discuss Covid-19 probe
TWO World Health Organisation experts will spend the next two days in the Chinese capital to lay the groundwork for a larger mission to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
One animal health expert and one epidemiologist during their visit to Beijing today and tomorrow will work to fix the “scope and terms of reference” for the future mission aimed at learning how the virus jumped from animals to humans, the agency’s statement said yesterday.
Scientists believe the virus may have originated in bats, then was transmitted through another mammal such as a civet cat or an armadillo-like pangolin before being passed on to people at a fresh food market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.
The two WHO experts will work with Chinese scientists to determine the scope and itinerary of the investigation, said WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris. She declined to name them.
“They have gone, they are in the air now, they are the advance party that is to work out the scope,” she told a briefing.
This would involve negotiations on issues including the composition of the fuller team, she added.
“One of the big issues that everybody is interested in, and of course that’s why we’re sending an animal health expert, is to look at whether or not it jumped from species to a human and what species it jumped from,” said Ms Harris.
“We know it’s very, very similar to the virus in the bat, but did it go through an intermediate species? This is a question we all need answered.”
In an effort to block future outbreaks, China has cracked down on the trade in wildlife and closed some wet markets, while enforcing strict containment measures that appear to have virtually stopped new local infections.
The WHO mission is politically sensitive, with America, the top funder of the UN body, moving to cut ties with it over allegations the agency mishandled the outbreak and is biased toward China.
More than 120 nations called for an investigation into the origins of the virus at the World Health Assembly in May.
China has insisted that WHO lead the investigation and for it to wait until the pandemic is brought under control.
America, Brazil and India are continuing to see an increasing number of cases.
The last WHO corona virus specific mission to China was in February, after which the team’s leader, Canadian doctor Bruce Aylward, praised China’s containment efforts and information-sharing.
Canadian and American officials have since criticised him as being too lenient on China.
An Associated Press investigation showed that in January, WHO officials were privately frustrated over the lack of transparency and access in China, according to internal audio recordings.
Complaints included that
China delayed releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information.
Privately, top WHO leaders complained in meetings the week of January 6 that China was not sharing enough data to assess how effectively the virus spread between people or what risk it posed to the rest of the world, costing valuable time.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo have said it may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, although they have presented no evidence for this and China strongly denies it. Scientists and US intelligence agencies have said it emerged in nature.
“If there was wrongdoing – and we may never know that for sure – it will be very hard to uncover,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law in Washington, DC.
“The wet market was closed immediately. There is no independent record, evaluation or investigation of a potential zoonotic source, so it will be very hard to go back and piece together,” he said.