WHO team in Wuhan to start long-delayed coronavirus investigation after quarantine is lifted

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Members of the 13-strong international team will complete their two-week quarantine in the next 24 hours, stepping into a city that was once the center of the global outbreak, but is now largely back to normal a year later. The scrutiny of the team’s work will be immense as they navigate what will likely be a political minefield to discover how the virus that brought much of the world to a halt first emerged.

“The world’s eyes are on this, the world’s opinions are on this,” Dutch virologist and team member Marion Koopmans told CNN Wednesday morning as she prepared for a final round of meetings before leaving her quarantine hotel.

“We’re aware of it, there’s no getting around it. That’s why we’re really trying to stay focused, we’re scientists, we’re not politicians, we’re really trying to look at this from a scientific perspective.”

Part of that involves letting go of any preconceived ideas about how the virus evolved and spread to look at what the evidence says, and move on from there, Koopmans said. The team has conducted video interviews with each other and Chinese scientists for the past two weeks, “to discuss what we know and what we don’t.”

The demand for answers will be great, especially after the investigation itself has been postponed several times, but Koopmans cautioned patience.

“I think we really have to deal with the expectations, if you look at some of the previous searches for the origins of outbreaks, they have taken years to complete,” she said. “The early and relatively easy studies have been done, have already been published.”

A previous report from a WHO team in China, published in February 2020, found that “significant knowledge gaps remain” about the virus, although it supported previous findings that the virus appeared to be from animals, with the likely initial outbreak in a seafood market in Wuhan.

Political pressure

While the WHO team will try to ignore the political element of their work, this can be difficult.

Last week, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said that both WHO and China could have acted faster and more vigorously to stem the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Several countries, especially the United States and Australia, have accused Beijing of downplaying the severity of the outbreak in the early stages and hindering an effective response until it was too late. In particular, officials in Wuhan have been accused of silencing whistleblowers and hiding evidence of the transmission of the virus between humans, in a rerun of the 2003 SARS epidemic.

The WHO itself also came under tremendous pressure when then US President Donald Trump said last year it was a “puppet” of China and secured funding from Washington for the organization. Shortly after his inauguration, President Joe Biden reversed that order.

As China has taken control of the pandemic domestically, in stark contrast to the ongoing chaos in the US and much of Europe, Beijing has begun to push back forcibly on allegations of guilt through alternative – and baseless – theories about bring forward the origin. of the pandemic, including conspiracies about a US military germ lab.
Last week, the head of the US delegation to WHO called on China in Geneva to allow the Wuhan team access to “healthcare providers, former patients and laboratory workers” and to share all scientific studies on animal, human and environmental samples. a market in Wuhan, Reuters reported.

“We have a solemn duty to ensure that this critical investigation is credible, conducted objectively and transparently,” said US Representative Garrett Grigsby, who gave rise to a rebuke from the Chinese delegation, accusing him of “political pressure”.

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

Hard work

A year after Wuhan was shut down, after the city has been scrubbed and sanitized repeatedly to erase every trace of the virus, there is skepticism about how much the team of researchers will be able to discover.

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

The extent to which the Chinese authorities are willing to cooperate is unclear, especially as even senior health officials are beginning to question whether the virus originated in Wuhan, continuing the ‘multiple origins’ theory first introduced by the country’s propaganda bodies in an apparent attempt to divert blame from the initial handling of the pandemic.

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said whether the WHO teams’ journey would be successful “ depends heavily on the government’s willingness to cooperate and be accommodating when sharing the research, giving them access to places of interest by talking to people they want to talk to. “

“The main problem is that this issue itself has become so politicized that it is very difficult to conduct independent, transparent and thorough research,” Huang said, adding that “perhaps the international society should also lower their expectations, a more realistic understanding. We shouldn’t really expect anything magical from what this trip entails, especially given that they plan to complete the study in a few months.

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