World Health Organisation officials will arrive in China this weekend to lay the groundwork for an international investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 disease , a scientific endeavour that has been complicated by a global political feud. The health body has said the team will comprise two officials, which it did not name, who will meet counterparts at China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and National Health Commission. The meetings are a precursor to an international mission to be led by the WHO at a later unspecified date. “We need to lay out a series of investigations that will get the answers that I’m sure the Chinese government, governments around the world, and ourselves really need in order to manage the risk going forward into the future,” said executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme Mike Ryan in a regular press briefing on Tuesday. The focus will be on understanding how the virus, first identified in China more than six months ago, jumped from animals into humans on its way to becoming a pandemic that has killed over 500,000 people and infected more than 11 million. It has also triggered the worst diplomatic spat in decades between Washington and Beijing, blowing the lid off simmering tensions from trade and Taiwan to control of the South China Sea. In the process, Washington was so angered by the WHO and what it called the organisation’s pandering to China as the outbreak spread, it pulled funding. On Tuesday, the United Nations said in a statement that the US had said it will withdraw entirely from the WHO on July 6 next year. An international inquiry into the origins of the virus – and what form such an investigation should take – has been a point of contention and argument. US officials, including President Donald Trump, have called the disease the “China virus” and say Beijing covered up the outbreak, allowing it to spread. They also put forward theories it escaped from a laboratory in China, while Beijing blasted back that the US military may have released the pathogen in Wuhan, where it was first identified. The WHO has had to navigate between the two squabbling economic and military giants as it tried to help guide the global response to the disease, attracting criticism along the way for being slow in declaring it a pandemic. However, a unanimous resolution passed by the WHO’s governing body the World Health Assembly in May and supported by China called for the organisation to investigate the origins of the virus. Trump formally pulling US out of WHO over ‘China puppet’ claims. Biden promises to rejoin it if he wins The WHO officials would have “deep engagement” with Chinese counterparts to understand what investigations and data were available and build from there, Ryan said. Investigations would likely start in the central city of Wuhan, where infections were detected in December. “But after that we have to keep an open mind, science will stay open to all possibilities,” Ryan said. In comments on Wednesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said experts from both sides would work out the scope of the assignment for the international group led by the WHO. “Tracing the virus is a process that is constantly developing. Next steps may include further international scientific research and cooperation on a global scale,” Zhao said. Chinese officials have maintained that investigations should be undertaken in multiple countries, arguing that the virus could have been brought into China from elsewhere. “China is going to make it very clear what they want the investigation to be, and from WHO’s perspective they are going to make it very clear what it has to be in order to be accepted as credible internationally,” said Sara Davies, professor of international relations focusing on global health governance at Griffith University in Australia. US increasingly excludes China from coronavirus research projects The credibility would be linked to how much access the WHO team will have to data and laboratories, in particular the Wuhan laboratory implicated in theories shared by the US government, Davies said. “This is where it gets really tricky … if it happened in the US or the UK, to what degree would they be willing to permit an international mission to come in and look at their national laboratories?” she asked. But China may see its acceptance of the mission when the US is withdrawing from the WHO as boosting its aim to be a “leader in health diplomacy”, she said. A US expert would lend credibility to the mission but whether one is included could be affected by the decision to withdraw from the WHO, Davies said. Apart from all the politics, getting a team on the ground will give researchers an opportunity to better understand the scope of the work that has already been done in China, scientists say. Some of this information, such as which kinds of animals were sampled in a wet market linked to the first known cluster of cases, has not been publicly released. Having a “face to face” to break down some of these barriers and understand the ongoing research would be a critical part of the mission, said veterinary epidemiologist Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor at Hong Kong’s City University, noting that China had the technical capability for such investigations. But whether clear answers about the source would emerge was another question, Pfeiffer said. “The world is expecting too much from the team, it’s a bit like [expecting] someone going to the moon to figure out if we can live there,” he said. “This is about building trust and facilitating communication and maybe [gaining access] to some data that we haven’t seen before.”