Hong Kong China is aggressively promoting alternative theories about the source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 and pollutes the water, while the World Health Organisation is preparing to launch the long-awaited investigation into the causes of the pandemic.
In recent weeks, the Chinese state media, which often give the impression that the virus originated outside China, have picked up a number of recent studies showing that the virus has spread outside the country faster than originally thought.
Government officials have also speculated that the virus may have been introduced into the city of Wuhan, central China, by imports of frozen products. Following the outbreaks of epidemics in many Chinese cities in recent months, including Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, the authorities have identified frozen food packages as a potential source.
While infectious disease experts say that cold surfaces can be vectors for the virus, WHO and other health authorities consider the risk of contamination from food or food packaging to be low.
A Chinese diplomat in India tweeted on Tuesday about the possibility of cold chain transmission and asked for further research into the unconfirmed theory that the U.S. military was involved in the spread of the virus.
If a cold chain is now possible, it cannot be ruled out that Wuhan has been duped by the virus, diplomat Ja Liu wrote.
The first one. In December 2019, a patient in the Chinese city of Wuhan began to show symptoms identified by doctors as a new coronavirus. Since then, the virus has spread all over the world. So the virus has turned into a global pandemic. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP (originally published on 17 March 2020)
Combined with statements by senior U.S. officials who have argued unconfirmed theories that the virus was produced in a Chinese laboratory, the politicization of the origin issue in Beijing threatens to undermine the ability of scientists to learn lessons from the current pandemic that could help prevent the next one, public health experts said.
In the current geopolitical climate with the game of mutual accusations, scientists can’t just do science, he said.
From Linfa,
A specialist in infectious diseases at Duke Noose Medical School in Singapore and a member of a WHO team who discovered the coronavirus causing severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS.
Chinese officials tried to divert attention from the coronavirus shortly after the first outbreak in Wuhan was discovered. They refused to share the data collected on animals in the Wuhan market, where the outbreak was detected, and agreed to support only the WHO pandemic investigation, which did not take into account the country focus.
According to Chinese political experts, Beijing’s renewed efforts to promote counter-reports on the emergence of the pandemic are a response to a combination of increasing international and domestic pressure.
The origin debate is a puppet for a debt debate, and China does not want to be blamed for the global pandemic, he said.
Yangjeon Huang,
a senior colleague on global health issues at the State Relations Council in New York He referred to the lawsuits filed against China in the U.S. federal courts in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
The market in Wuhan where the lightning was discovered was already closed at the beginning of January.
Photo:
Noel Zelis/Agence France Press/Getty Images
At the same time, the ruling Communist Party of China is trying to reassure public opinion in the country because
Dali Yang,
a political scientist specializing in China at the University of Chicago.
The Chinese media are at the service of people’s mass psychology, Yang said. In China, people are looking for evidence that can justify their country and themselves.
China Central Television, the Chinese public television company, has facilitated a new investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the results of which were published in the Wall Street Journal last week and which showed that the presence of the coronavirus was already known on 13 June. December 2019 infected residents on the west coast of the United States, two weeks before doctors in Wuhan shared fears that unexplained pneumonia would spread throughout the city.
The topic of coronaviruses appeared in the US as early as mid-December and attracted more than 200 million visitors to the Chinese social media platform Weibo, similar to Twitter. In the course of history, the security cameras did not mention that the first known case of Covid-19 in Wuhan occurred even earlier, on the first day of the war. December.
The Chinese media also reported extensively on the comments
Alexander Kekule,
The director of the Biosafety Research Institute in Halle, who told German television in November that the majority of Covid-19 cases worldwide can be attributed to a viral mutation that occurred in Italy.
These reports refute Mr Kekules’ comment that the original virus had arrived in Italy from China and that the Italian epidemic probably started in January, more than a month after the Chinese epidemic. Mr Kekule did not react immediately to the request for comments.
The Communist Party’s flagship magazine published a study by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published in the SSRN, a pre-printed platform of the medical journal Lancet, claiming that the first human-to-human transmission on the Indian subcontinent occurred three to four months before the Wuhan eruption.
Unexpected investigation disappeared from the platform last week. Lancet stated that the article had been removed from the CRDD at the request of the authors. The authors did not respond to the request for comments. Scientists say that authors tend to remove works from the platform if the research is wrong or incomplete.
The Chinese government is not the only one to have unconfirmed theories about the origin of the pandemic. U.S. Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo
and other US officials have repeatedly suggested that the coronavirus was produced in a Chinese laboratory, although numerous independent studies indicate that the virus probably developed in the wild.
Public health experts say that the origin of the virus remains a mystery and that it is possible that the pathogen arrived in China from another country. It is said that a problem arises when governments give weight to assumptions without supporting solid data.
Reporting early results without sufficient scientific evidence causes political confusion, he said.
Jennifer Bui,
Senior Policy Researcher and Policy Research Department of Tang China at RAND Corporation.
Isolation Department of Wuhan Hospital, China, March 10.
Photo:
Resilience/Ageneration France-Presse/ Getty Images
The political climate has raised questions about the effectiveness of the planned WHO study, which was already facing restrictions from China.
The study will be carried out by a team of 10 specialists from the United States, Germany and other countries selected by the WHO after consultation with the Chinese. Although Beijing has agreed to allow the team to do fieldwork in Wuhan, the date has not yet been set. Until then, they had limited themselves to examining the findings of their Chinese counterparts.
The WHO explained that regular meetings allow the international mission to learn about the results achieved by Chinese researchers in the past.
Pressure in China to find evidence that the virus originated elsewhere could affect the ability of scientists to conduct independent research, said Huang of the Foreign Affairs Council. At the same time, it feeds those who are sceptical about the WHO and China by questioning the Panel’s scientific conclusions.
The virus can appear in any country and spread rapidly in this globalised world, he said. You don’t have to play paid games.
-Liang Qi contributed to this article.
Write to Sha Hua at [email protected].
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