Name: Coronavirus: Doubts about the WHO COVID-19 mission fuel China’s advantage
Brand: smh.com.au
SKU: smh-com-au-342
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Coronavirus: Doubts about the WHO COVID-19 mission fuel China’s advantage

preview

Doubts about the WHO COVID inquiry fuel China’s advantageWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementA highly anticipated global inquiry, more than a dozen investigators, a fortnight of inspections at ground-zero of the virus that sent borders up around the world, and here we are.After months of negotiations to get the inspectors into Wuhan, left the public little more enlightened than they were in March last year.The WHO investigators said COVID-19 was likely to have been transmitted from bats to an intermediate animal host to humans. The virus was likely to have started in China, but may have also begun elsewhere. It could have begun in the Wuhan wet market, or it may have been circulating widely in the community in the weeks leading up to the first cluster.The only theory to have been effectively ruled out is that it sprang from a Wuhan laboratory leak.The gap between scientific probability and certainty has never been wider for China’s coronavirus diplomacy.As the investigators were preparing to announce their findings in Wuhan on Tuesday night, Chinese President Xi Jinping was on a virtual meeting with a group of central and eastern European leaders.The only theory to have been effectively ruled out is that it sprang from a Wuhan laboratory leak.The group of 18 was divided. Serbia, Hungary and Montenegro were among six countries who have enthusiastically taken up China’s offer of vaccines to inoculate their populations against a disease that has killed more than 2 million people. But Estonia, Slovenia and Lithuania were among six others who are increasingly wary of Beijing’s vaccines, its promises of economic cooperation and its role in the coronavirus pandemic.Xi urged the group to put their differences aside. “In the face of such unprecedented challenges, countries must come together and respond with solidarity and coordination like never before,” he said. “These efforts will contribute to a global community of health for all.”AdvertisementThen, as before, the Chinese leader was careful not to publicly discuss the origins of the virus, opting for a message of unity against a common enemy in an attempt to rise above tumultuous multinational sparring over the past year.But the day after, his Foreign Ministry was doing its best to recast China not just as a protector of developing countries but as the potential victim of a foreign virus itself.The ministry seized on the mission’s presentation. Despite leaning towards a Chinese-origin for the disease, the investigators did raise the possibility that it may have also been present elsewhere before the first cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019.“There have been more and more international reports that the virus and epidemics broke out in multiple places in the world in the latter half of the year 2019,” said ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin.He repeated the claim twice for emphasis. It was followed by a volley of scientific voices in Chinese state media. “Any country that reported outbreaks in 2019 should be investigated,” said Lu Hongzhou, co-director of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre at Fudan University.Feng Duojia, president of the China Vaccine Industry Association, “Wuhan is just a stop for virus origin tracing, and those experts should not expect to find an answer here. Also, it is scientifically impossible, as there were cases found in other countries even before the outbreak in Wuhan was reported,” he claimed.The Australian investigator on the is not convinced. “I think it started in China. The evidence for it starting elsewhere in the world is very limited,” he said on Wednesday.Dwyer praised the Chinese scientists and authorities for being hospitable hosts, but significant questions still remain over the level of access to data that Chinese authorities were actually willing to tolerate for the joint investigation.Then on Thursday, the day after the WHO team left China, there were key developments.WHO investigators told that up to 90 patients were hospitalised with COVID-19 symptoms near Wuhan in the two months prior to the Huanan market outbreak, but the team was told wastewater samples prior to December 2019 had been destroyed and access to blood donations in that period were restricted due to local laws.“We also know the Chinese were reporting the people who went to hospital were really sick,” said Dwyer. “But we now know there’s a lot of ordinary transmission going on between otherwise healthy people, so there must’ve been many, many more cases in December than were identified.”The revelations do not square neatly with claims by Liang Wannian, the China lead on the investigation, that there was no evidence of community transmission in Wuhan prior to December 2019.“There is no substantial unrecognised circulation of SARS-COV-2 in Wuhan during the latter part of 2019,” he said at the joint-press conference alongside the WHO team members who a day after leaving the podium, raised concerns about their access to information.The WHO itself has also not been immune to claims of political compromise after it was widely criticised for its initial handling of the outbreak at the start of 2020, when it delayed declaring it a pandemic, urged countries not to shut their borders and then praised the handling of the crisis by China, one of its biggest financial backers.“The problem is: it’s a bit like looking at your internal governance yourself,” said Professor Marylouise McLaws, an epidemiologist and independent member of WHO’s Readiness and Response to COVID-19 panel.“It is disappointing that it wasn’t completely independent without the badging of WHO.”The questions over WHO’s impartiality and the threats posed to independent research by Chinese conditions have driven a division with the United States that also threatens to overshadow some of its preliminary results.On Thursday the US State Department said it would not accept the findings of the report until full access could be guaranteed.“I think, clearly, the Chinese, at least heretofore, had not offered the requisite transparency that we need,” said department spokesman Ned Price. has left the scientists on the WHO team dismayed.“And so it starts. No need to wait for the report, right?,” Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist and the head of WHO’s collaborating centre for emerging viral diseases, fired off on Twitter.“Let me be clear,” added Peter Daszak, a zoologist and member of the Wuhan team. “I’m disappointed that a statement came out that might undermine the veracity of this work even before the report is released.” Daszak believes it will be at least two years before any concrete findings are revealed. He has spent the days since the preliminary presentation emphasising what could be the most significant breakthrough of the field trip.“There was a clear potential for a link from animals we know are susceptible into that market,” he said.The unconfirmed link, once thought to be live pangolins, may actually be frozen carcasses of another obscure animal - ferret badgers.“We are talking about something very different right now than a packet of frozen fish from somewhere else in the world,” he said.“The supply chains come from places in China where we know the SARS coronavirus - a related virus - in other words a direct link from the potential bat origins of this virus into Wuhan market.“To many of us on the team it was a clear clue to what might have happened. It was one of the pathways that we thought was more likely than others for sure.”The team of virologists, epidemiologists and scientists will now return to their home bases across Europe, the US and Asia before preparing their report on the preliminary findings. Koopmans has pushed for investigators to travel to Italy, where reports of detection of the virus in November have yet to be confirmed.The final conclusions, when they do eventually come, may end up being immaterial to the much larger diplomatic and economic game now being waged by China.After meeting with Xi, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said China’s medical support was “a decisive moment of our fight against this pandemic”.“I will always be very thankful to President Xi and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and very proud that we succeeded to get [this] level of cooperation.”A note direct from our foreign correspondents about what’s making headlines around the world. .&nbsp;Log in, or to save articles for later. is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Advertisement

Doubts about the WHO COVID inquiry fuel China’s advantageWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementA highly anticipated global inquiry, more than a dozen investigators, a fortnight of inspections at ground-zero of the virus that sent borders up around the world, and here we are.After months of negotiations to get the inspectors into Wuhan, left the public little more enlightened than they were in...

public

Eryk Bagshaw

The Sydney Morning Herald - Australia's leading news source. Independent. Always.

Coronavirus: Doubts about the WHO COVID-19 mission fuel China’s advantage

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS