China has blocked the arrival of a World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, claiming their visas had not yet been approved, while some members of the group were underway.
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed dismay, saying he had called on China to let the team in. to travel at the last minute, ”he said.
‘But I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials. And I have made it clear once again that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team. “
The WHO has been trying to send its team of global experts from a number of countries for several months. It has been in talks with Chinese officials since July. Scientists have long said it is essential to find out how the virus has jumped species into humans.
The expedition to China was on its way to Wuhan to investigate the earliest cases. It did not intend to investigate claims that the virus originated in a Chinese lab, which have been rejected by most scientists.
The mission has been criticized by the US, where outgoing President Donald Trump has categorically blamed the Chinese for the pandemic.
Garrett Grigsby, of the US Department of Health and Human Services, said in November that the investigation appeared to “violate” WHO mandate. “Understanding the origins of Covid-19 through transparent and inclusive research is what needs to be done to fulfill the mandate.”
Dr. WHO’s Mike Ryan said the team worked closely with Chinese colleagues in planning the trip.
“We all worked with the idea that the team will start implementing today [Tuesday],” he said.
Two members of the team, who had traveled a long distance, had started their journey, he said, but it had become clear that their visas had not been approved by the Chinese authorities.
“We didn’t want to send people into the air unnecessarily if there was no guarantee that their arrival in China would be successful,” Ryan said. “Dr. Tedros has taken immediate action and spoken to senior Chinese officials and made them fully aware of the absolutely critical nature of this.”
The team hoped it was “just a logistical and bureaucratic problem that can be solved very quickly”. One of the two colleagues on the way had returned, while the other was in transit in a third country.
“This is frustrating and, as the Director General said, disappointing. That disappointment is very clear from Dr. Tedros directly to our counterparts in China. We are confident that we can resolve these issues in good faith in the coming hours and resume the team’s efforts as soon as possible, ”said Ryan.
Ilona Kickbusch, the founding director and chairman of the Global Health Center in Geneva, said that geopolitics stood in the way of countries in defeating the coronavirus pandemic together and that the hostilities that had been sparked could now get in the way of finding out. how this started.
“I think it will be incredibly difficult to find the origin of the virus because so much time has passed,” said Kickbusch.
The world managed to come together to eradicate smallpox at the height of the cold war, she noted. Even when Sars, another coronavirus, surfaced in China and wreaked havoc between 2002 and 2003, the global response was one of collaboration and a drive for greater transparency.
At the time, Beijing had acknowledged that it had made mistakes, reorganized the Ministry of Health and set up China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Other countries had given it the benefit of the doubt and called for more cooperation.
Sars actually led to China [understanding] that they needed to be much more integrated into it [global] system, ”said Kickbusch. “It was an opening period.” But now she said, “There’s a closing of the mind, very clearly, on all sides.”
Before the crisis, geopolitical tensions had eased in the global health response, she said, noting how the US-China trade war had turned into a “geopolitical blame game.” As a result, “China clung completely [and] the US did what they did ”and eventually“ the whole world suffered ”.