Covid-19: in Wuhan, relatives of victims kept at bay from the WHO?

Messengers blocked, bribes, intimidation ... Is Beijing trying to interfere in the investigation into the origins of the pandemic?

While WHO investigators are embarking on fieldwork in Wuhan on Thursday to try to understand how the Covid-19 crisis began, some relatives of victims accuse the Chinese authorities of trying, by various means, to dissuade them get in touch with the investigators.

Some families mobilized in 2020 to demand sanctions against local officials who minimized the epidemic at its beginnings, going so far as to reprimand the very first whistleblowers.

Problem: several of them have tried to take legal action, but claim that their complaints were deemed inadmissible from the outset.

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"The authorities are very nervous"

Since the arrival of WHO experts, who arrived on Chinese soil on January 14 and then placed in a fortnight, the pressure from the authorities seems to have increased.

While nearly a hundred relatives of victims exchanged on WeChat messaging, very popular in China, their discussion group was brutally blocked around mid-January, reports Zhang Hai, one of the leaders of the movement launched by these groups. families.

“It shows that (the authorities) are very nervous.

They fear that these families will come into contact with WHO experts, ”said this 51-year-old man, whose father died at the start of the epidemic without the death being officially linked to Covid, for lack of tests at the 'time.

“When the WHO arrived in Wuhan, (the group) was forcibly dismantled.

As a result, we lost contact with many members.

"

In Wuhan, the epidemic has killed 3,900 people, according to official figures, the vast majority of the 4,636 deaths recorded in China.

The country managed to largely halt the pandemic as early as the spring, although limited cases have erupted in recent weeks in some regions.

With less than 90,000 patients according to official figures, China remains very far from the balance sheets recorded in the rest of the world.

"5,000 yuan as condolence"

Many relatives of victims say they doubt these figures, saying that many of them died before they could be formally identified as sick with the coronavirus.

A retiree, who believes her daughter was killed by the virus in January 2020, says she was summoned last week by the authorities who ordered her not to "talk to the media or let herself be manipulated".

“After that, they came to my house yesterday, sang the same song to me and gave 5,000 yuan (€ 640) as condolences”, testifies this resident.

Questioned by AFP, the Wuhan town hall did not respond to questions relating to the families' requests.

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For his part, Zhang Hai called on WHO experts to have “the courage” to meet with the families, saying they feared that they would be bamboozled by the authorities or be blocked in their investigation.

According to him, the testimony of families on the explosion of the virus in Wuhan could usefully enlighten international investigators, as Beijing seeks to evacuate all responsibility.

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According to the first elements provided by Chinese investigators at the beginning of 2020, the virus would have been transmitted by a bat to another animal, before attacking humans.

The contamination allegedly exploded in a Wuhan market where wild animals, including pangolins, were sold alive.

Another theory, spread in particular by former US President Donald Trump, blames the Wuhan virology laboratory, where researchers were working on coronaviruses.

For now, it is not said that international experts will have access to this laboratory during their stay in Wuhan.