W.H.O. Ceded Control to China In Murky Hunt for Virus Origin
On a cold weekend in mid-February, when the world still harbored false hope that the new coronavirus could be contained, a World Health Organization team arrived in Beijing to study the outbreak and investigate a critical question: How did the virus jump from animals to humans?
At that point, there were only three confirmed deaths from Covid-19 outside China and scientists hoped that finding an animal source for the coronavirus would unlock clues about how to stop it, treat it and prevent similar outbreaks.
“If we don’t know the source then we’re equally vulnerable in the future to a similar outbreak,” Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergency director, had said that week in Geneva. “Understanding that source is a very important next step.”
What the team members did not know was that they would not be allowed to investigate the source at all. Despite Dr. Ryan’s pronouncements, and over the advice of its emergency committee, the organization’s leadership had quietly negotiated terms that sidelined its own experts. They would not question China’s initial response or even visit the live-animal market in the city of Wuhan where the outbreak seemed to have originated.
Nine months and more than 1.1 million deaths later, there is still no transparent, independent investigation into the source of the virus. Notoriously allergic to outside scrutiny, China has impeded the effort, while leaders of the World Health Organization, if privately frustrated, have largely ceded control, even as the Trump administration has fumed.
From the earliest days of the outbreak, the World Health Organization — the only public health body with a global remit — has been both indispensable and impotent. The Geneva-based agency has delivered key information about testing, treatment and vaccine science. When the Trump administration decided to develop its own test kits, rather than rely on the W.H.O. blueprint, the botched result led to delays.
At the same time, the health organization pushed misleading and contradictory information about the risk of spread from symptomless carriers. Its experts were slow to accept that the virus could be airborne. Top health officials encouraged travel as usual, advice that was based on politics and economics, not science.
The W.H.O.’s staunchest defenders note that, by the nature of its constitution, it is beholden to the countries that finance it. And it is hardly the only international body bending to China’s might. But even many of its supporters have been frustrated by the organization’s secrecy, its public praise for China and its quiet concessions. Those decisions have indirectly helped Beijing to whitewash its early failures in handling the outbreak.
Now, as a new Covid-19 wave engulfs Europe and the United States, the organization is in the middle of a geopolitical standoff.
China’s authoritarian leaders want to constrain the organization; President Trump, who formally withdrew the United States from the body in July, now seems intent on destroying it; and European leaders are scrambling to reform and empower it.
The search for the virus’s origins is a study in the compromises the W.H.O. has made.
On the surface, an investigation into the virus’s origin is progressing. Beijing recently approved a list of outside investigators. The health organization has agreed that key parts of the inquiry — about the first patients in China and the market’s role in the outbreak — will be led by Chinese scientists, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The documents, which have never been made public, show that W.H.O. experts will review and “augment, rather than duplicate,” studies undertaken by China.
Even as it has heaped praise on the Chinese government, the organization has refused to disclose details of its negotiations with Beijing and hasn’t shared documents with member states outlining the terms of its investigations.
“The W.H.O. prioritizes access to the country,” said Gian Luca Burci, a former legal counsel for the agency. “But if you do that to the bitter end, you lose soft power.”
The question of the virus’s origin remains a critical mystery that, if solved, could help prevent another pandemic and help scientists create vaccines and treatments. When the first SARS outbreak began spreading in China in late 2002, officials hid the epidemic for months. But when they finally acknowledged it, they soon allowed in international teams to investigate the animal source.
This time, the hunt for a source has been shrouded in secrecy.
Internal documents and interviews with more than 50 public-health officials, scientists and diplomats provide an inside look at how a disempowered World Health Organization, eager to win access and cooperation from China, has struggled to achieve either. Its solicitous approach has given space for Mr. Trump and his allies to push speculation and unfounded conspiracy theories, and deflect blame for their own mistakes.
The prospect of an apolitical inquiry into the virus’s origins is dwindling. China has extracted concessions from the health organization that have helped the country delay important research and spared its government a potentially embarrassing review of its early response to the outbreak.
“Unfortunately, this has become a political investigation,” said Wang Linfa, an Australian virologist in Singapore who helped identify bats as the hosts of the first SARS coronavirus. “Whatever they do is symbolic.”
The organization said it was committed to a full-scale investigation irrespective of political distractions.
“Divisions between and within countries have provided fertile ground for this fast-moving virus to grow and gain the upper hand,” the W.H.O.’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement to The Times. He said political attacks had undermined the world’s response. “Leadership in a crisis such as this requires listening, understanding, trust and moving forward together.”
The question of where Covid-19 began is especially intriguing because the initial theory, centered on illegal wildlife sales at the Wuhan market, is now in doubt.
There is powerful evidence that the new coronavirus passed naturally from an animal into humans. Scientists have found a virus in bats that is a close relative, and they suspect that it may have infected another animal species before it reached people.
But though they agree that many cases were linked to the market in Wuhan, many scientists no longer believe it is where the outbreak began.
For now, however, it’s still where the trail goes cold.
You can read the rest here:
https://nyti.ms/3oMw0It
www.bbc.co.uk
