Politico | ‘The virus is winning’: China’s rebuff of WHO’s new coronavirus investigation alarms experts
- Experts say a complete investigation inside China is necessary to pinpoint the origins of the virus, which has had a devastating toll around the world
- The denial of access to Wuhan deepens suspicion the Chinese government is attempting to cover up the possibility that the virus was intentionally engineered
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Phelim Kine, Carmen Paun and Ryan Heath on politico.com on July 25, 2021.
And experts told Politico that the denial of access to Wuhan, the original epicentre of the virus outbreak, deepens growing suspicion the Chinese government is attempting to cover up the possibility that the virus was intentionally engineered.
“We have had already two coronavirus pandemics come out of China and it’s more likely than not will that we will have another coronavirus pandemic come out of China, so [a China-based inquiry] is our best chance to get our hands around how this gets out of bats and into humans,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “We can’t do this without going to China. There is no way you can get to the bottom of this from 5000 miles away.”
Chris Beyrer, Desmond M Tutu professor of public health and human rights at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, called China’s rejection of the inquiry “very problematic.”
Beyrer attributed China’s action to the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s determination to stifle any potentially negative revelations about the origins of Covid-19.
“I think the Chinese now have an official [pandemic] narrative and they are pushing it very hard and there is no opportunity for them to revisit that narrative of having asserted success” of its pandemic control efforts, Beyrer said.
China’s rejection of the inquiry to learn the virus origin has drawn criticism on Capitol Hill. Congressman Ami Bera, chair of the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, Central Asia and Nonproliferation, told Politico in a statement that China’s move was “unacceptable.” Bera demanded a “comprehensive, transparent and independent analysis into the origins of Covid-19.”
But acrimony toward China for its derailment of the proposed follow-up WHO investigation is not universal. Hotez places the responsibility for the rejection on the WHO for focusing on the Wuhan lab in the emergence of the virus.
“We are demanding things that the Chinese government will never agree to, [such as] banging on the door of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to show the notebooks which they will never agree to,” Hotez said.
“There is a misunderstanding [by the WHO] that you will get to the bottom of this by talking to Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists and poring over notebooks. Are you going to do a search of 15,000 pages of Wuhan Institute of Virology notebooks and look for where someone wrote ’oops!’?
United Nations officials also fault the tone of the WHO’s communication with China about the follow-up investigation. Achim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of United Nations Sustainable Development Group, acknowledged Tedros’ has to do a “very difficult tightrope walk” in engaging with China at a “very volatile time” in its relations with major powers, including the United States and the European Union.
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The global spread of the highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19
But he said China’s interpretation of the investigation as arbitrary foreign diktat did not help. “Being a head of a UN agency, when I talk to China, when I talk to the US, I don't talk by kicking in the door and telling either capital ‘this is what you should do,’” Steiner told Politico.
A Geneva-based diplomat who participates in WHO weekly briefings with member countries offered a less charitable assessment of Tedros’ “tough talk on China.” He called Tedros’ July 16 announcement of the investigation “the surprise of the year” and suggested it partially reflected his career ambitions.
“Maybe Tedros has just done his calculations and realises that China will not be able to block his re-election [for demanding a robust investigation into virus origins],” said the diplomat, who requested anonymity to be able to speak freely.
Despite the challenges posed by the current impasse between the WHO and China, Beyrer says that the long-term risk of emergent deadly coronaviruses requires that the stand-off be bridged. “We are in a struggle that the virus is winning,” he said. “But what we always want to do is prevent [future] pandemics and to do that you need to know how this thing emerged and became so fully adapted to human-to-human spread.”
Osterholm said the Biden administration’s potential role in helping broker a resolution to the impasse is limited and called for a US government focus on support for the WHO to prevent future pandemics. “I think that at this point the administration is looking at all the information we have [about Sars-Cov-2 origins] … but that still doesn’t get us back to what we need to learn from the Chinese,” he said.
“We have already thrown all the intelligence at this and not got to the bottom of it,” he said.