A team of scientists from the World Health Organization is in China investigating the mysteries of the pandemic more than a year after it broke out: where the coronavirus came from and how it spread to humans.
The long-awaited trip, initially hampered by China’s delays, started what could be a long process of putting the pieces of the virus together to answer key questions about the pathogen and how to prevent similar – and possibly worse – future outbreaks .
But the world will be watching the results of the investigation – and China’s willingness to cooperate will also be the focus of intense interest around the world.
The fact that the trip took place more than a year after the virus was first identified raised concerns that the government was not transparent in handling the virus. And political fights broke out, especially between China and the United States, with the Trump administration blaming China for the pandemic.
Fifteen members of the WHO scientist delegation were expected to arrive in China, but two were denied entry after a positive test for antibodies to the coronavirus, and will remain in Singapore, according to the world body.
While many researchers emphasize the need for science, not politics, to guide WHO’s work, experts warn that they will have to navigate a political quagmire.
“The purpose of the investigation is not to designate a guilty country or authority,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior global health researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. “But we also have to be realistic: this is a very politicized world, and if research suggests that China is the source of the outbreak, this hypothetical finding could indeed be used as smoking evidence to support claims that China is guilty. ”
China faced strong criticism for allegedly minimizing the severity of the initial outbreak of the mysterious pneumonia-like disease in late December 2019, and for not taking action quickly enough to alert WHO of the evidence of person-to-person transmission.
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The suspicion about how China handled the outbreak came after its problematic response to the 2003 SARS pandemic, when it was discovered that Chinese authorities had deliberately suppressed and concealed information from the public. WHO praised China from the start for its efforts to contain the Covid-19 outbreak, but there are still doubts about where and how the pathogen emerged.
The WHO investigation is taking place amid China’s efforts to tightly control information about the pandemic. Last month, a Chinese court sentenced a citizen journalist to four years in prison for reporting on the early outbreak in the city of Wuhan, regardless of state-controlled media.
There were also reports last year that a 34-year-old doctor named Li Wenliang was punished by the police for warning about the virus in the WeChat messaging app in December 2019. Li died of Covid-19 a few months later, and after a wave of criticisms, the government took disciplinary action against the police officers involved and hailed him posthumously as a “martyr”.
Few details about the WHO visit have been made public, but a focus of the investigation is likely to be to establish a schedule of events and determine where there are still gaps in knowledge, said Dr. Dale Fisher, president of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, which was established by WHO to respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Fisher, who is not involved in the current investigation, was part of a WHO mission that visited China in February 2020 to assess the rapidly evolving outbreak. During that trip, the team traveled to Wuhan, in Hubei province, where the virus is believed to have arisen and the researchers subsequently published a 40-page report detailing what was then known about how the coronavirus spreads and how it could be contained.
At the time, WHO itself was criticized for not doing enough to alert the rest of the world to the coronavirus and for relying excessively on information from Chinese authorities. In May, President Donald Trump accused WHO of being a “puppet of China” and announced that the United States would withdraw its funding for the agency.
A few hours after his inauguration, President Joe Biden signed an executive action to rejoin WHO.
Fully controlled
Although WHO scientists say they expect Chinese scientists to appear, Beijing is known for having controlled information about the coronavirus.
According to an investigative report published by the Associated Press in December, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has restricted research into the origin of the virus, determining that any discovery must be approved by a task force that reports directly to President Xi Jinping . NBC News did not confirm the AP report.
The problem, said Huang, of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, is the possibly contradictory motivations driving Chinese scientists and politicians.
“China has an incentive to investigate the origins of the outbreak, not only to help end the current pandemic, but also to prepare for the next one,” he said. “But this research is sanctioned by the government, which raises concerns about the extent to which they are willing to share this information with WHO.”
The Chinese government’s record of secrecy fueled theories that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a major research center that was the first in China to receive the highest level of biosafety release. No reliable evidence has been found to support such claims, but the researchers who traveled to China this week said their aim was to keep up with the science.
“If this is where the investigation gives us a hypothesis, then we are not going to rule it out,” said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who is part of the WHO delegation, about the possibility that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory.
Most research so far on the origin of the coronavirus has focused on a seafood market in Wuhan, which was related to some of Covid-19’s first known cases. But Koopmans said it is also possible that the virus originated elsewhere in China.
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“I think it is likely that Wuhan was an over-sprawling event,” she said, adding that some cases identified in early December had no noticeable ties to the seafood market. But, she said, the team will investigate a number of different hypotheses.
After groups from Covid-19 were reported in Wuhan and evidence emerged that the virus was spreading among humans, China placed the sprawling city of 11 million people under a severe block on January 23, 2020.
A year later, after reporting almost 99,000 cases and more than 4,800 deaths, China was able to keep the virus relatively contained, although a new blockade was imposed in Hebei province, near Beijing, after the region registered an increase in new infections. since January 2.
Meanwhile, in the United States, more than 420,000 people have died and more than 25 million cases have been reported.
In many ways, the crisis in the United States has increased the stakes for China in the domestic market, especially after the government suffered a reaction from its own citizens at the beginning of the pandemic for dealing poorly with the response, said Bonnie Glaser, senior Asia adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington.
“There was a period of several months in China when it became clear that people were criticizing the government, and the Communist Party worked hard to bring this narrative under control and turn it into a positive one,” she said.
The level of dissent was unusual and came mainly from younger Chinese, who “crossed a dangerous line in China” by questioning the government’s legitimacy, she added.
Since then, most cities in China have more or less returned to normal and there are signs that the economy is recovering, although experts have warned that the real number of cases and deaths of Covid-19 in China may be much higher than that the government officially reported.
“The narrative today is that China has been successful in preventing the spread and has been far more successful than the United States and other democracies around the world,” said Glaser.
Still, the WHO investigation will force the Chinese government to juggle to protect this narrative internally with the defense of the country’s international reputation, according to Huang, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“WHO is influential because it is important to China’s global health diplomacy,” he said. “The last thing China wants to do is fight publicly with WHO, because that would look bad diplomatically and politically.”