‘Very disappointed’: WHO’s COVID experts blocked from China | Al Jazeera

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) says he is “very disappointed” that China has still not approved the entry of a team of international experts tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus, as some countries grapple with the increasing burden of the pandemic.

Two members of the 10-strong international team had already begun their journey to China, when it emerged that they had still not been granted entry, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told an online news conference in Geneva on Tuesday afternoon.

“Today we learned that Chinese officials have not yet finalised the necessary permissions for the team’s arrival in China,” he said, noting that the WHO, China and transit countries had worked together on the arrangements.

“I have been in contact with senior Chinese officials and I have once again made clear that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team. I have been assured that China is speeding up the internal procedure for the earliest possible deployment.”

The WHO expert team – led by Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO’s leading expert on animal diseases that cross the species barrier – is supposed to travel to Wuhan where the first cases of the coronavirus were reported at the end of 2019 to make in-depth “epidemiologic, virologic, serologic assessments” of people and animals in an attempt to find out where the virus might have come from...