WHO Covid team blocked access to China to study the origin of the coronavirus

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WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said two scientists from the United Nations team had already left their homelands to go to Wuhan when told that Chinese officials had not approved the necessary permits to enter the country .

The agreements had been agreed in advance in mutual consultation with China.

“I am very disappointed with this news,” Tedros told a press conference in Geneva on Tuesday. “I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials and have made it clear once again that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team.”

Tedros said the WHO was “eager to get the mission started as soon as possible” and that he was assured that Beijing was speeding up the internal procedure for “early deployment”.

Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergency program, said there was a visa problem and a team member had already returned home. The other was waiting for transit in a third country.

WHO officials have long negotiated with Beijing to give a team of global scientists access to key sites to investigate the origin of the virus – first discovered in Wuhan in December 2019 – and the likely jump from an unidentified host species to humans.

In May, WHO agreed to investigate the global response to the pandemic after more than 100 countries signed a resolution calling for an independent investigation.
Leaked documents show that China has mishandled the early stages of Covid-19

Ryan said the team hoped it was “just a logistical and bureaucratic problem” that “can be resolved in good faith in the next few hours and resumed the team’s efforts as soon as possible”.

The United States and Australia have been in the lead in criticizing China’s handling of the early stages of the pandemic, accusing Beijing of downplaying its severity and preventing an effective response until late.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed China for the global pandemic and announced that the US would end its relationship with the WHO, saying that China had not correctly reported the information it had about the coronavirus and put pressure on it on the WHO to “deceive the world”.
The US has demanded transparency in WHO operations in China. In November, Garrett Grigsby of the US Department of Health and Human Services told the WHO meeting that the terms of the investigation into China “had not been negotiated in a transparent manner” and that “the investigation itself appears to contradict” his mandate.
A wealth of confidential documents obtained by CNN last year from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Hubei Province – where the virus was first discovered in 2019 – showed how Chinese officials gave the world more optimistic data than they do internally access, due to an initial under-reporting of the number of cases during the early stages of the outbreak.
The Chinese government has repeatedly rejected allegations made by the US and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information related to the virus, claiming that this had preceded the outbreak.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday that the country would welcome the WHO team, Reuters said.

CNN has reached out to China’s Foreign Ministry to comment on Tedros’s comments.

As countries around the world grapple with new peaks and outbreaks of infection, China appears to be recovering. Last month, the country posted positive economic growth for the second consecutive quarter.
China's latest potential culprit in its quest for foreign sources of coronavirus? Auto parts packaging

Foreign Minister Wang Yi praised China’s anti-pandemic efforts at home and abroad, saying the country “launched a global humanitarian emergency campaign” and “helped reach consensus on a global response to Covid-19. “

As the WHO team prepared to board, Chinese officials and state media have questioned the origin of the virus, saying “growing research suggests the pandemic was likely caused by separate outbreaks in multiple places around the world” , Wang said. .
On Monday, reports circulated on Chinese social media that the virus had been found on auto parts packaging in several cities, including from foreign brands.

China has been testing and disinfecting frozen products imported from abroad for months, fearing the virus could re-enter the country that way, even though experts remain skeptical of this as a potential source of infection.

The WHO says it is “highly unlikely that people will be able to get Covid-19 from food or food containers,” and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say the risk is “considered very low.” Both maintain that there is no evidence of such a transfer, and countries have even threatened to file a case against China with the World Trade Organization over import restrictions.

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