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As a team from the World Health Organization (WHO) prepares to go to China to investigate the origins of COVID-19, Beijing has stepped up efforts not only to prevent new outbreaks, but also form the story about when and where the pandemic began.
China has dismissed criticism of its early handling of the coronavirus, first identified in the city of Wuhan in the end of 2019, and foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday that the country would welcome the WHO team.
But amid simmering geopolitical tensions, experts said the researchers were unlikely to be permitted to scrutinise some of the more sensitive aspects of the outbreak, with Beijing desperate to avoid blame for a virus that has killed over 1.8 million people globally.
“They will have to be politically savvy and draw conclusions that are acceptable to each of the major parties,” he added.
While other countries continue to struggle with infection surges, China has aggressively doused flare-ups. Following a new cluster of cases last week, the city of Shenyang sealed off whole communities and needed all non-essential employees to stay home.
On Saturday, senior diplomat Wang Yi praised the anti-pandemic attempts, saying China not only curbed national infections, but also”took the lead in building a worldwide anti-epidemic defence” by supplying aid to more than 150 nations.
But aware of the criticism China has faced worldwide, Wang also became the highest-ranking official to question the consensus about COVID-19’s roots, stating”more and more studies” show that it emerged in numerous regions.
China is also the only country to claim COVID-19 can be transmitted through cold chain imports, together with the country blaming new outbreaks in Beijing and Dalian on contaminated shipments – although the WHO has downplayed those risks.
TRANSPARENCY
China has been accused of a cover-up that delayed its first response, allowing the virus to spread farther.
The topic remains sensitive, with only a handful of research into the origins of COVID-19 made accessible to the public.
But there have also been signs China is willing to share information that contradicts the official picture.
Last week, a study by China’s Center for Disease Control showed that blood samples from 4.43 percent of Wuhan’s population comprised COVID-19 antibodies, indicating that the city’s disease rates were much higher than originally acknowledged.
But scientists said China must also share any signs suggesting COVID-19 was circulating domestically long before it had been officially identified in December 2019.
An Italian study revealed that COVID-19 might have been in Europe several months before China’s first official case. Chinese state media used the paper to support concepts that COVID-19 originated overseas and entered China via contaminated frozen food or foreign athletes competing in the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.
Raina MacIntyre, head of the Kirby Institute’s Biosecurity Research Program in Australia, said the analysis needed to draw”a comprehensive global picture of the epidemiological clues”, including any signs COVID-19 was present outside of China before December 2019.
However, political issues mean they will probably not be given much leeway to investigate one hypothesis, the outbreak was due to a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said MacIntyre.
“I think it’s unlikely all viruses in the lab at the time will be made available to the team,” she said. “So I don’t think we will ever know the truth.”
