Daily US Times: A World Health Organization (WHO) team due to investigate the coronavirus origin in the city of Wuhan has been denied entry to China.
Two members had already set out on their journey – one is in transit in a third country and other has now turned back.
The problem was a lack of visa clearances, WHO says.
The long-awaited coronavirus origin probe was agreed upon by China in December after many months of negotiations with the WHO.
The coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019, with the initial outbreak linked to a market.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO chief, said he was “very disappointed” that China had not yet finalised the permissions for the team’s arrivals “given that two members had already begun their journeys and others were not able to travel at the last minute”.
On Tuesday, he told reporters in Geneva: “I have been assured that China is speeding up the internal procedure for the earliest possible deployment,” explaining that he had been in contact with senior officials in China to stress “that the mission is a priority for WHO and the international team”.
The WHO has been working to send a 10-person team of international experts to Wuhan for months with the aim of probing the animal origin of the Covid pandemic and exactly how the virus first crossed over to humans.
WHO announced last month that the investigation would begin in January 2021.
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