WHO team in Wuhan to start long-term coronavirus investigation after clearing quarantine

WHO team in Wuhan to start long-term coronavirus investigation after clearing quarantine

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Members of the international 13-person team will end their two-week quarantine in the next 24 hours, entering a city that was once the center of the global outbreak, but now, a year later, has practically returned to normal. The scrutiny of the team’s work will be immense, as they navigate what is likely to be a political minefield to discover how the virus that caused a strike in much of the world first emerged.

“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 a final round of meetings before leaving her quarantine hotel.

“We are aware of that, there is no getting around it. That is why we really try to stay focused, we are scientists, we are not politicians, we are really trying to look at it from a scientific point of view.”

Part of that involves letting go of all preconceived notions about how the virus evolved and spread, to look at what the evidence says and go from there, Koopmans said. The team 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 high, especially after the investigation itself has been delayed several times, but Koopmans warned of patience.

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

An earlier report by a WHO team in China, published in February 2020, found that “important knowledge gaps” remain about the virus, although it endorsed previous findings that the virus appeared to have originated in animals, with the likely first outbreak at a seafood market in Wuhan.

Political pressure

Although the WHO team tries to ignore the political element in their work, it can be difficult to do so.

Last week, the Independent Pandemic Preparedness and Response Panel said that both WHO and China could have acted faster and more strongly to stem the start of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Several countries, mainly the United States and Australia, have accused Beijing of minimizing the severity of the outbreak during its early stages and of preventing an effective response until it is too late. In particular, officials in Wuhan have been accused of silencing whistleblowers and hiding evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus, in a repeat of the SARS epidemic in 2003.

WHO itself was also under immense pressure, with then President of the United States Donald Trump saying last year that he was a “puppet” of China and pulling Washington’s funding for the organization. Soon after his inauguration, President Joe Biden reversed that order.

As China has the pandemic under control domestically, in stark contrast to the ongoing chaos in the United States and much of Europe, Beijing begins to retreat vigorously over any accusation of guilt, advancing alternative – and unfounded – theories about the origin of the pandemic, including conspiracies about a US military germ laboratory.
In Geneva last week, the head of the United States delegation to WHO asked China to allow Wuhan’s team access to “caregivers, ex-patients and laboratory workers” and to share all scientific studies on animal samples, human and environmental threats from a market in Wuhan, Reuters reported.

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

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

Hard work

A year after Wuhan went into blockade, after the city was repeatedly cleaned and sanitized to eliminate any traces of the virus, there is skepticism about how much the research team will be able to find out.

“It is a great challenge for anyone to discover the cause of this,” said Jin Dongyan, professor of virology at the University of Hong Kong. “It would be very difficult now to obtain any first-line evidence to investigate the origin of SARS-COV-2 and the Covid-19 index cases. It is really challenging. And I doubt that these international experts can find anything. I am not very optimistic. “

The extent to which Chinese officials are willing to cooperate is unclear, especially as even senior health officials have begun to question whether the virus originated in Wuhan, promoting the “multiple origins” theory that was first publicized by country propaganda in an apparent attempt to deflect blame for the initial pandemic treatment.

Yanzhong Huang, senior global health researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the success of the WHO team’s trip “depends a lot on how much the government is willing to cooperate and accommodate in terms of sharing the research, allowing them to have access to places of interest, talking to people they want to talk to. “

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

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