Impasse over WHO virus mission 'not just a visa issue', China says

The delays caused to a long-planned mission by WHO experts to China to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic are "not just a visa issue", Beijing has said.

Talks are, however, continuing over "the specific date and specific arrangement of the expert group's visit", foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters of the highly sensitive mission on Wednesday.

A 10-strong team was due to arrive in China this week after months of painstaking negotiations.

But the expert mission to China to find the origins of the coronavirus pandemic stumbled before it even began, with the head of the World Health Organisation complaining that Beijing was blocking the team from entering the country.

The sensitive mission has been beset by delays and politics, with now fears of a whitewash by Beijing.

"The issue of origin-tracing is incredibly complicated. To ensure the work of the international expert team in China goes smoothly, we have to carry out necessary procedures and make relevant arrangements," said Hua.

She said the country is "doing its best to create good conditions for the international expert group to come to China".

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus earlier said he was "very disappointed" with the last-minute bar on entry, in a rare castigation of Beijing from the UN body.

Beijing is determined to control the origin story of the virus, which has killed more than 1.8 million people so far and laid waste to global economies.

The first cases of the coronavirus were recorded in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, prompting accusations of chaotic, secretive handling by Chinese authorities which led to its spread beyond China.

US President Donald Trump called the pandemic the "Wuhan virus".

But Beijing has so far resisted pressure for a full independent probe into the early days of the outbreak. Instead, it has seeded doubt as to whether the pandemic even started inside its borders.

The WHO mission was billed as a way to cut through the rancour and seek clear answers on how the virus jumped from animals to humans.

The origins of Covid-19 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 the virus narrative.

Scientists initially believed the virus jumped to humans at a market selling exotic animals for meat in the city of Wuhan. But experts now think the market may not have been the origin of the outbreak, but rather a place where it was amplified.

It is widely assumed that the virus originally came from bats, but the intermediate animal host that transmitted it between bats and humans remains unknown.