The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) confirmed Wednesday it would send a team to Wuhan, China, in January to investigate the origins of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic – eight months after the Communist Party of China admitted it had destroyed all the evidence it had collected there.
The coronavirus pandemic originated in Wuhan; leaked internal Chinese government documents dated the first confirmed case of Chinese coronavirus to November 17, 2019. In January, Gao Fu, the head of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, definitively stated: “The origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market.”
Since then, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that a U.S. Army facility in Maryland is the true origin of the pandemic.
The W.H.O. team of ten scientists is expected to deploy to Wuhan in January, the BBC reported on Monday, and to stay in the country for between four to five weeks. The mission is meant not to find evidence that the Communist Party failed to properly address the threat of a pandemic in the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan, but to “reduce the risk in the future.”
“It’s really not about finding a guilty country,” Fabian Leendertz of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute reportedly told the Associate Press.
The Global Times, a Communist Party propaganda outlet, claimed on Thursday that the mission is only suspected to begin in Wuhan, leaving the door open for Chinese authorities to divert investigators elsewhere.
“One team member believed the China trip will start from Wuhan, where COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] cases were first reported, but may also extend to outside the country,” the Times reported. The newspaper also noted, citing a conversation with Leendertz directly, that the Chinese government is heavily involved in the investigation.
“We are already in good contact with the Chinese teams from various disciplines and are looking forward to supporting where we can and if needed. You have some top leader scientists in China,” Leendertz reportedly told the newspaper.
Leendertz claimed the investigation may lead the scientists “outside China,” though he did not elaborate.
The first cases of Chinese coronavirus – a type of coronavirus undiscovered before 2019 – were indisputably documented in Wuhan, a city of about 11 million people. The government of Taiwan – which invested heavily in an infectious disease tracking agency following the outbreak of another coronavirus, SARS, in 2003 – alerted the W.H.O. to the emergence of a new, infectious respiratory disease in China in December 2019. The United Nations agency “mostly ignored” the warning, Taiwan later objected.
Despite the evidence, the W.H.O. claimed that the respiratory disease spreading in Wuhan was not transmissible from person to person on January 14.
By January 22, the W.H.O. admitted, “data collected through detailed epidemiological investigation and through the deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan.”
The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported in May that, in between those dates, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping personally urged W.H.O. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is not a medical doctor, not to reveal the contagious nature of the disease to the public. Tedros denied the report.
By the time the W.H.O. issued its confirmation of a contagious disease spreading, Wuhan authorities had conducted operations that widely contributed to the virus’s spread, among them the arrest and intimidation of doctors sharing basic information online on how to prevent the spread of an infectious disease. In anticipation of the Lunar New Year, Wuhan also hosted a banquet for 130,000 people, most of them elderly and thus more vulnerable to the virus.
Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang later revealed that 5 million people had left the city prior to authorities implementing social distancing and lockdown measures.
The day after the W.H.O.’s declaration that the virus was infections, Gao, the senior Communist Party public health expert, specifically declared a Wuhan “wet market” – where animals are sold for consumption in unsanitary conditions – the origin of the virus. Presumably, the W.H.O.’s investigation will start at that location, the former Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
Public health investigators are unlikely to find any evidence at that location that would contribute to understanding the pandemic, as the Chinese government admitted in May that it had “disinfected” the area.
Chinese National Health Commission official Liu Dengfeng said in a statement that all evidence had been destroyed to “prevent the risk to laboratory biological safety and prevent secondary disasters caused by unidentified pathogens.”
The W.H.O. nonetheless sent a team to China in July to investigate the origin of the virus. That team remained in Beijing – about 716 miles away – and spent most of their time in China under coronavirus quarantine, resulting in no significant contributions to understanding the origin of the virus.
“Obviously the arrival and quarantine of individuals and working remotely is not the ideal way to work, but we fully respect the risk-management procedures put in place,” Mike Ryan, the head of the W.H.O.’s emergency response, said at the time.
That month, the Chinese Foreign Ministry openly pressured the W.H.O. to send a team to “trace the origin of the virus in the U.S.” No evidence exists that the pandemic originated there, nor did the Foreign Ministry offer any.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has nonetheless repeatedly promoted a conspiracy theory claiming that a U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland leaked the virus, then blamed coronavirus infections on e-cigarettes, or “vapes.”
“When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” Zhao speculated in April. He later added that cases of e-cigarette lung injuries may be secret coronavirus cases, although no evidence exists that lung injuries related to vaping are contagious.
“The U.S. is responsible for the pandemic situation,” Zhao said in July.
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