The now closed Wuhan market suspected to be the cause of the pandemic, on December 1 310. – Koki Kataoka / AP / SIPA
It is a particularly sensitive investigation which will begin for the World Organization of health. More than a year after the appearance of the new coronavirus , a WHO team is expected in China to determine the origin of the pandemic and this without a priori. For the Chinese regime, on the other hand, the objective is to avoid any responsibility for the epidemic which has killed more than 1.8 million people worldwide.
The visit is so sensitive that it takes on the appearance of a secret mission. His dates were not even specified, the WHO simply referring to “the first week of January”.
If it has managed to practically eradicate the disease on its soil, Beijing has not been able to prevent Donald Trump regularly accusing him of having spread “the Chinese virus” on the planet. The Communist authorities, on the other hand, do not miss an opportunity to cast doubts on the Chinese origin of the virus, whereas it had initially blamed a market in the city of Wuhan where live animals were sold.
United States.
Wuhan “is the objective of the mission”
Scientists generally believe that the The original host of the virus is a bat, but the intermediate animal that allowed human contamination is unknown. The Chinese press is increasingly talking about the hypothesis of an importation of the virus by frozen food, a theory rejected by the WHO.
For the international organization, there is no doubt that its experts will be able to investigate freely, even if Beijing has still not confirmed that Wuhan is on the program of the visit. “The team will go to Wuhan, that is the objective of the mission,” however, declared in mid-December the head of health emergencies of the Geneva institution, Michael Ryan.
Understand and learn
The mission is made up of ten scientists (Denmark, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, Russia, Vietnam, Germany, United States, Qatar and Japan). “The goal is not to point out a culprit country or authority,” said one of the team, Fabian Leendertz, of the Robert Koch Institute in Germany. “It’s about understanding what happened to prevent it from happening again.”