February 15, 2021–Over a year after the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization concluded a four-week investigatory mission in Wuhan, China, making comments favoring the Chinese government’s narrative.
It was a political win for China and a significant loss for science.
In almost a surreal and surprising outcome, the mission team downplayed the possibility the virus started in a Wuhan lab and pointed to other theories popular in China.
“All the work that has been done on the virus and trying to identify its origin continue to point to a natural reservoir of this virus and similar virus in bat population,” said Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the WHO Mission in Wuhan. “But since Wuhan is not a city or environment close to this bat environment, a direct jump from bats to Wuhan is not very likely.”
Mission Downplayed
Despite the significance of the investigation, the WHO downplayed its mission on its website, not mentioning it in the news section. And today its director kept the focus on the global distribution of vaccines.
“What matters now is how we respond to this trend,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said today. “The fire is not out, but we have reduced its size.”
A China-Led Mission
The WHO mission team members met with COVID-19 victims and their relatives, visited the Wuhan Seafood Market and visited the lab in Wuhan.
Incidentally, it should be noted that the WHO mission team included 17 participants representing China and an equal number from other nations, according to a United Nations statement.
It appears that just gaining access to Wuhan was viewed as the success.
Politics in the Room
The mission was part science, part diplomacy, and not in equal measures.
“The politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table,” Embarek told Science Magazine. “We had anywhere between 30 and 60 Chinese colleagues, and a large number of them were not scientists, not from the public health sector. We know there was huge scrutiny on the scientific group from the other sectors. So the politics was there constantly.”
Score One for China’s PR Efforts
The WHO held a joint press conference with China on Feb. 9 at the end of the mission. China’s lead in the mission, Dr. Liang Wannian, promoted the idea that the virus was spread through frozen foods. It’s a theory that the Chinese media has been aggressively pushing, according to Science Magazine.
Meanwhile, the WHO’s Embarek, a Danish food-safety and zoonosis specialist and head of the mission in Wuhan, suggested that it is “extremely unlikely” the virus spread from a Wuhan lab because the city is not near an environment where bats are live.
Remarkably, that conclusion completely ignores documented evidence that lab workers from the Wuhan lab collected specimens and live bats from caves located around China and brought them back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
‘All Hypothesis Open’
What’s noteworthy is that just a few days later, the head of the WHO offered contradictory analysis. All hypotheses about the origin of the pandemic “remain open and require further analysis and studies,” Tedros said in a Feb. 12 press conference.
Walking Back ‘Extremely Unlikely’
Given the political pressures and mixed messages, it’s hard to know how relevant Embarek’s comments during the joint-press conference are.
In an interview with Science Magazine the reporter Kai Kupferschmidt directly asks him why he chose the words “extremely unlikely” in describing the possibility the virus escaped from a lab.
Embarek responded that the team focused on prioritizing theories to organize plans for future studies. “We should not put too much focus on the wording,” he said. The victory, he said, was in finding “a way of getting studies done that would otherwise not have been done.”
That raises questions on funding for the studies and how much of a factor that plays in the decision-making.
Better Late and Imprecise Than Nothing
The bottom line appears to be that the WHO would rather work with China on conducting research than to not conduct a mission at all.
“The politicization of events has not helped over the past year. But I think we’ve got the best out of it,” Embarek said.
Finally, the WHO is expected to release a report this week. To date the virus has killed more than two million people worldwide and infected more than a hundred million.
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