COVID-19 Briefing: the WHO-China Mission
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Transcript COVID-19 Briefing: The WHO-China Mission Professor David Heymann CBE Distinguished Fellow, Global Health Programme, Chatham House, Executive Director, Communicable Diseases Cluster, World Health Organization (1998-2003) Dr Peter Daszak President, EcoHealth Alliance Professor Marion Koopmans Head, Department of Viroscience, Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam Professor John Watson Senior Medical Adviser, Health Protection and Medical Directorate, Public Health England Chair: Emma Ross Senior Consulting Fellow, Global Health Programme, Chatham House Event date: 10 March 2021 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speaker(s) and participants, and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event, every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions. The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. © The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2021. 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE T +44 (0)20 7957 5700 F +44 (0)20 7957 5710 www.chathamhouse.org Patron: Her Majesty The Queen Chair: Jim O’Neill Director: Dr Robin Niblett Charity Registration Number: 208223 2 COVID-19 Briefing: The WHO China-Mission Emma Ross Good afternoon and thanks for joining us again for the Chatham House COVID-19 webinar series, with our Distinguished Fellow, Professor David Heymann. Today, we’re going to take a look inside the WHO- China joint mission, whereby an international team of experts, corralled by WHO, went to Wuhan last month to collaborate with Chinese colleagues to study, among other things, how this all started. Our guest experts today are three members of the international team: Peter Daszak, Marion Koopmans, and John Watson. Peter’s an expert on the cause and spread of zoonotic diseases, i.e., diseases that can be passed from animals to humans. He is a long-term research collaborator with Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, studying bat coronaviruses and worked on the animal environment aspects during the mission. Marion’s a Virologist, who specialises in emerging infectious diseases. She was on the team that found, in 2013, that dromedary camels were an intermediate host for the virus that causes MERS, and during the pandemic, she has tracked the spread of the virus in minks, mink farms in Europe. In Wuhan, she was involved in the molecular epidemiology group sifting through the viral sequencing data. John is an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist and an expert in the surveillance, prevention and control of respiratory infections, who’s overseen responses to a range of outbreaks, from SARS to pandemic flu. In Wuhan, he was on the epidemiological team that considered the information about the occurrence of the virus in humans. So, welcome to you all, bit of a long introduction, but I think you have such a varied expertise to bring to this conversation, so it’s great to have all those aspects gathered together. Just a bit of housekeeping first. To ask questions at any time, please write them in the ‘Q&A’ function on Zoom. Upvoted questions are more likely to be selected, and this event, as always, is on the record. Oh, okay, you lot, let’s get started with this. So, Marion, I was hoping you could orient us first and talk about how these kinds of missions are set up and how do they work? I mean, what’s the dynamic between – within these joint missions, between the hosts and the international visitors, and you’ve been on a few, over the years, is there anything special about this one? Professor Marion Koopmans Yeah, well, let me start with this one, because, yes, I think this one is special, by all means. So this was really set up – so we were asked to look into this ultimate question, can we really understand what this – what started this pandemic, how did – what happened there, what was the origin of this pandemic? And that is a question that was discussed already by the WHO team in their first visit in Wuhan, and it was set up as a scientific series of studies to be co-developed between an international team of experts and Scientists on the ground in China, to really step back – step wide to try and, yeah, understand this important question. So, the way this is done is that we have started to work, mostly online initially, already in the months before this mission, building from a series of so-called phase one studies where we asked a lot of questions, a lot of information from our Chinese colleagues, and they started to work on those studies. And since our visit, so what we’ve done there is also initially online, later face-to-face, go over all the studies, look at the data that they had gathered, look at the analysis, suggest additional ways of analysing that data, and really scrutinise it, discuss it, and see what we could conclude from that. So, that’s been the process. There is, I think, a bit of a misunderstanding out there, if you hear some of the comments where people think this is like an inspection, that’s not what this was, this is a scientific joint collaborative study trying to deeply understand what happened in the early stages of this pandemic. So, the first focus was on going to the place where, of course, the first cases were identified and trying to get a deep understanding of what happened in December, maybe the months before that, as a starting point, looking at the market, what 3 COVID-19 Briefing: The WHO China-Mission happened there as a starting point, and then working backwards from there. So, we see it as a starting point, not the mission that will give the answers, I think that’s also another common misunderstanding. Emma Ross Okay, thank you for that introduction. Professor Marion Koopmans And maybe in terms of how it is, what you were asking, how is it to work, so, indeed, I’ve been involved in other studies like this, both nationally and internationally, so these are complex endeavours. You have to bring together information from many different sources, from the medical side, public health side, from the veterinary side, that by itself, in many countries, is already – it’s not necessarily linked. You have to get to know the colleagues on the ground and their expertise and their way of working and their culture of working. And, of course, we had here the handicap of the – you know, being in quarantine, full-blown quarantine first for 14 days and then, with restrictions in the second half of our visit. So, none of that is really conducive to the type of discussion you would want to have, when you sit around the table, look at data, scrutinise data. But was, I think, what was exceptional in this one, I’m sure Peter and John have things to say there, it’s just the sheer amount of interest from the media, and of course, that this is a study in the middle of, well, a bit of a geopolitical debate that has its own ideas. So, that was – well, it is a more complicated setting, but as a team, we really have worked hard and discussed extensively that we really want to try to stick to the science and work in a scientific process, also with our colleagues in China. Emma Ross Yeah, well, what was the dynamic like? What’s the set up with the dynamic between the host team and the international team and also the scale of it, ‘cause there were ten international experts, what about on the other side and what was the dynamic between you? Professor Marion Koopmans So, there was a core group of experts, but there was also many people around, because what you have to understand that the list of studies that we settled for was long and people will be able to see that once the final report comes out. So, and what we heard is that around 1,000 people have worked to get the data to the point where we could, you know, discuss them, scrutinise them, review them, during our one month visit. So, these were staff from the different level CDCs, from the Wuhan CDC, the provincial CDCs, the China Central CDC, from the laboratories, so depending on the topics, several of those people would be around as well in the meetings. So, what we did is tried – well, we had our online period first, which is challenging, as we all know by now, and then, once we were able to sit face-to-face, we had a mix of plenaries and then we broke that down into those three theme groups, just to have a bit of different ways of working and interacting, and that, in the end, I think that worked out well. Emma Ross Okay. I wanted to go to David now, actually. David, you’ve been on a few of these in your time, these kind of missions, I wanted – I was hoping you could explain briefly what’s the importance of these missions and the work to try and understand the origins of an outbreak? I mean, why do we really need to do this? Does it really matter if we ever – if we never find out? I mean, we are where we are with the pandemic, 4 COVID-19 Briefing: The WHO China-Mission and we’ve got a lot to deal with, what’s the value in going backwards and doing this and how important is it really, at this time, right now? Professor David Heymann CBE Thanks, Emma.