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[/news/china/index.html China] has denied entry to a team of [/news/world-health-organization/index.html World Health Organisation] (WHO) experts who were due to arrive in the country to investigate the origins of the [/news/coronavirus/index.html coronavirus].
The news comes amid growing suspicions of a cover-up in the country where Covid-19 is believed to have originated at the end of 2019, although its origins remain bitterly contested as China remains determined to control the narrative.
The head of the World Health Organisation says he was 'disappointed' that Chinese officials have not finalised permissions for the arrival of the team of experts.
A year after the outbreak started, kynghidongduong.vn WHO experts were due in China for a highly politicised visit to explore the origins of the coronavirus, in a trip trailed by accusations of cover-ups, conspiracy and fears of a whitewash.
The WHO said China granted permission for a visit by its experts, with a 10-person team expected to arrive this week - but before most could even begin their journeys they faced roadblocks, with Beijing yet to grant them entry.
Pictured: Workers in protective suits walk past the Hankou railway station in Wuhan in China's Hubei province, April 2020.
Wuhan is believed to have been where the Covid-19 outbreak, that sparked the global pandemic, began. The first case was reported on December 31, 2019
The WHO's emergencies director Michael Ryan said Tuesday that the problem was a lack of visa clearances, adding that he hoped it was a 'logistic and bureaucratic issue that can be resolved very quickly.'
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a rare critique of Beijing, says members of the international scientific team have begun over the last 24 hours to leave from their home countries to China as part of an arrangement between WHO and the Chinese government.
'Today, we learned that Chinese officials have not yet finalised the necessary permissions for Lạc Sơn Đại Phật the team's arrival in China,' he said at a news conference Tuesday in Geneva.
'I am very disappointed with this news, given that two members had already begun their journeys and others were not able to travel at the last minute,' Tedros told reporters in Geneva, in a rare rebuke of Beijing from the UN body.
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He added that he has 'been in contact with senior Chinese officials' and that he had 'once again made it clear that the mission is a priority for the WHO.
'I have been assured that China is speeding up the internal procedure of the earliest possible deployment.
We're eager to get the mission under way as soon as possible,' he said.
Earlier this week Chinese authorities had refused to confirm the exact dates and details of the visit, a sign of the enduring sensitivity of their mission.
Covid-19 was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, before seeping beyond China's borders to wreak global havoc, costing over 1.8 million lives and eviscerating economies.
But its origins remain bitterly contested, lost in a fog of recriminations and conjecture from the international community - as well as obfuscation from Chinese authorities determined to keep control of its virus narrative.
An international expert team has set off for China to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, but Beijing has yet to provide the necessary access.
Pictured: A TV grab taken on January 5, 2021 showing WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during a press briefing on Covid-19, during which he criticised China for not allowing the team entry
The WHO team has promised to focus on the science, specifically how the coronavirus jumped from animals - believed to be bats - to humans.
'This is not about finding a guilty country or a guilty authority,' Fabian Leendertz from the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's central disease control body who will be among the team to visit, told AFP new agency in late December.
'This is about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future, to reduce the risk.'
But doubt has been cast over what the WHO mission can reasonably expect to achieve and the state pressure they will face, raising fears that the mission will serve to rubber stamp China's official story, not challenge it.
The upcoming visit will not be the first time Covid-19 has brought WHO teams to China.
A mission last year looked at the response by authorities rather than the virus origins, with another in the summer laying the groundwork for the upcoming probe.
Visitors attend an exhibition on the fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, at Wuhan Parlor Convention Center that previously served as a makeshift hospital for COVID-19 patients in Wuhan
But this time the WHO will wade into a swamp of competing interests, stuck between accusatory Western nations and a Chinese leadership determined to show that its secretive and hierarchical political system served to stem, not spread, the outbreak.
It is unclear who the experts will be able to meet when they arrive in Wuhan to retrace the initial days and weeks of the pandemic.
Inside China, whistleblowers have been silenced and citizen journalists jailed, including a 37-year-old woman imprisoned last week for four years over video reports from the city during its prolonged lockdown.
Outside, responsibility for the virus has been weaponized.
From the outset, US President Donald Trump used the virus as political bludgeon against big power rival China.
He accused Beijing of trying to hide the outbreak of what he dubbed the 'China virus' and repeated unsubstantiated rumours it leaked from a Wuhan lab.
Trump then pulled the US out of the WHO, accusing it of going soft on China, a nation with which he was also engaged in a bitter trade war.
Critics say that blizzard of accusations sought to divert attention from Washington's bungled response to a crisis which has so far killed more than 355,000 Americans.
Without them, said one, 'a lot of these situations that we had in January 2020 would not have played out the way it did.'
'It is the geopolitics that...
put the world in this situation,' Ilona Kickbusch, of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, told AFP.
China has since deftly reframed its version of events, hailing its 'extraordinary success' in curbing the pandemic within its borders and rebooting its economy.
Beijing now says it will ride to the rescue of poorer nations, promising cheap vaccines and seeding doubt that the virus even originated in China.
People use phones to film and photograph fireworks in the sky during a celebration on New Year's Day at a park in Wuhan, Hubei province, January 1 2021
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox news" data-version="2" id="mol-c58eb030-4fc0-11eb-91e6-a1e990babbd0" website denies entry to team of WHO coronavirus investigators
