At the end of the week, relations between China and the World Health Organization (WHO), still looking for the origin of the coronavirus, have deteriorated. Far away is the leniency shown by the UN agency to Beijing for a year and a half.
Last month, WHO chief Adhanom Ghebreyesus initiated a change of attitude towards China. After long rejecting the hypothesis of a coronavirus leak from a laboratory of the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, he and his colleagues suddenly admitted that such accidents “happen” and that they are even “common”.
The WHO then asked China if it could conduct a second mission on its territory. Beijing was strongly against this.
And in recent days, tensions between the agency and China have grown even more.
“There are no bats in Wuhan”
In a documentary broadcast on Danish TV2 on Thursday, one of the WHO researchers who went to Wuhan at the beginning of this year told his story. He reported that there was a lot of pressure on his team. According to him, the main concern of Chinese officials was what the WHO would do in its final report with the laboratory accident hypothesis.
“In the beginning they wanted nothing about the lab (in the report), because (with) didn’t think it (accident) was possible, so they didn’t think it necessary to waste time on itsaid Peter Ben Embarek. “We insisted on including it because it was part of the whole question about the origin of the virus.”
The Danish scientist explains that his team managed to convince the Chinese to raise the possibility, “provided they do not recommend (further) studies to investigate this further”.
In the end, the WHO experts concluded in their report that this hypothesis was the “least likely”. They ranked it fourth and last, with the most likely scenario being contamination from an animal near humans.
On Danish television, Ben Embarek has voiced a theory that mixes animal transfer and escape from the lab. He said there are no wild bats in the Wuhan area. According to him, Patient 0 could therefore be an employee of the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had come into contact with a bat carrying the virus during his research.
However, the Danish scientist stated that it was just a hypothesis – which he considered “probable” – that could not be verified because his team “had not had the opportunity to consult documentation”. “We got a presentation and then we could talk and ask the questions we wanted to ask, and that was it,” he said.
“Not an exercise in scoring political points”
Simultaneously with the broadcast of this interview, the WHO reiterated the request it had made to China a few weeks ago. In particular, she stated that she needed “all the data” about Covid to investigate the hypothesis of a lab leak.
To this end, she called on all governments in the world to work together to expedite the investigation into the origins of Covid in a “spirit of partnership” and called for “depoliticization of the situation”. In particular, she mentioned China and urged that country to hand over its raw data on the first cases of coronavirus, which she described as “vital”.
“The WHO reiterates that searching for the origin of Sars-CoV-2 is not an exercise in blaming or scoring political points, and should not be done. To address the ‘laboratory hypothesis’ it is important to have access to all data, to take into account best scientific practices and to consider the mechanisms already in place by the WHO,” she said in a statement.
Provocative statement
As expected, China reacted negatively on Friday. It said it rejected “following politics” but supported scientific collaboration, the report said Global Times. Ma Zhaoxu, deputy foreign minister, said China, for its part, will continue to conduct “follow-up and additional” investigations into the origins of Covid-19, as indicated in the joint WHO report.
“The findings and recommendations of the joint WHO-China report have been recognized by the international community and the scientific community,” Ma said. This is a somewhat provocative statement, as many Western experts have questioned the report’s reliability. They believe that China has greatly influenced it. This impression was confirmed this week by Ben Embarek, one of the key contributors.
Almost two years after the first cases of the coronavirus emerged in China, the country seems to be bricking itself. It seems determined to prevent any other research in its field and thus try to make the animal-to-human trace (without any connection to the institute) the definitive solution at the international level. While making their own citizens think, with far-fetched fake news, that the coronavirus may very well have been born in… the United States.
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