The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expressed great excitement through its state media on Wednesday about the impending visit of a World Health Organization (W.H.O.) team that will supposedly work with the Chinese government on tracing the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus.
China’s Global Times presented the visit as a wonderful scientific jamboree, with the goal of “identifying the zoonotic source of the pandemic,” meaning the animals it randomly jumped out of without any human action that any member of the Chinese Communist Party should ever be held accountable for:
After consultation, the Chinese government agreed that the WHO experts will to cooperate and communicate with Chinese scientists and medical experts on the scientific plan for novel coronavirus tracing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a routine press conference.
Experts from China and the WHO will draw up the working scope and tasks of an international expert group led by the WHO, Zhao said.
“We came to the basic consensus with the WHO that virus tracing is a scientific issue, which should be carried out under international research and cooperation by scientists,” Zhao said.
The WHO believed that virus tracing is an ongoing process that may involve many countries and regions, and the organization will conduct similar visits to other countries and regions as necessary, Zhao said.
It is not clear if the W.H.O. team will be visiting Wuhan in its quest to discover the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus, but according to Chinese officials, we may rest assured they will be conducting “similar visits to other countries and regions as necessary.”
This will actually be W.H.O.’s third coronavirus-related mission to China. W.H.O. Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan told ANI News on Saturday that this time they will complete a “thorough investigation” into the origins of the virus that has killed thousands around the world and devastated nearly every national economy.
“What is needed now is a good investigation going back before December to find out where and how it jumped from animal to human. Was there any intermediate animal or not or it directly jumped from bat to humans which are also possible? Bats have been implicated in other viral diseases – Nipah for example. It is possible it came directly. It is also possible that there was an intermediate animal-like in the case of SARS. That thorough investigation still needs to be done,” Dr. Swaminathan said.
She tactfully mentioned the revised W.H.O. timeline that quietly appeared last week and confirmed China did not inform the international organization about the coronavirus outbreak of its own volition, as required by WHO regulations.
“Our W.H.O. country office in China picked it up and on January 1, W.H.O. activated its international mechanisms which we do as part of international health regulations whenever there’s any new signal gets reported. It is conveyed to everyone so that the whole world knows about it,” Swaminathan said.
“There have been reports of China delaying information and warning concerning the novel coronavirus which could have helped in containing its spread in the initial days,” ANI appended to its account of her remarks.
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