Beijing (AFP)
Patience ... The WHO investigation into the origins of the coronavirus will not quickly lead to the answers the world is waiting for, one of the international experts on mission in Wuhan told AFP.
Doctor Hung Nguyen-Viet is one of ten researchers who arrived in China last month to investigate the appearance of Covid-19 in this city in the center of the country, the first in the world to be quarantined in January 2020.
The visit is politically sensitive for the Chinese regime, which seeks to evacuate all responsibility in the outbreak of the pandemic which is the cause of more than 2.2 million deaths on the surface of the globe.
Beijing took more than a year to authorize the investigation, and researchers began their fieldwork last week, after 14 days of quarantine.
They should hardly find any traces of the first viral transmissions so long after the outbreak of the epidemic.
"Obviously, it is ideal to conduct the study at the time or immediately after," admits the expert in an interview with AFP by videoconference.
This is "a difficult question and difficult research," said the specialist, co-director of the program on human and animal health at the International Institute for Livestock Research in Nairobi.
- Brief mission -
"It is very unlikely that during such a short mission, we will have a very precise understanding or definitive answers to the question", warns this holder of a French doctorate in life and environmental sciences.
The visit should end before the Chinese New Year holiday, which begins this year on February 11, he said.
"So I think we have to be patient. We are in a process and we need time and effort to understand" what happened.
Since arriving in Wuhan, the team of researchers has visited hospitals where the first Covid patients were treated, as well as the famous Huanan market where wild animals were sold alive.
The first known death of the epidemic used to shop there.
"We were informed of the context and the various cases (of contamination) at the market", testifies Dr. Nguyen-Viet.
"It helped me to reconstruct events and better understand the environment of this market."
- No caves -
The team went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Wednesday, accused, in particular by former US President Donald Trump, of having leaked the virus from one of its laboratories, accidentally or not.
The Vietnamese specialist confided to having had "an interesting meeting" with one of the virologists of the Wuhan institute, Shi Zhengli, nicknamed in the press "Madame Bat", for his work on coronaviruses originating from this flying mammal.
According to him, international investigators will however not be able to visit the caves of Yunnan province (southwest) where a coronavirus very similar to that of Covid-19 was discovered in bat droppings in 2013. , according to a study published by Ms. Shi.
Scientists speculate that the virus may have passed from bats to humans via an intermediate mammal.
During their mission, the researchers were treated to a visit to an exhibition on the heroic fight of Wuhan people against the virus, all to the glory of the Chinese Communist Party in power.
Dr Nguyen-Viet, who worked for the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, assures us that he and his colleagues are fully aware of the political and media pressure surrounding their mission.
“But we are a group of scientists and we are working on a scientific topic,” he says.
"We are focused on our work".
© 2021 AFP