U.S. Experts Seeking Outbreak Access Kept Waiting by China

(Bloomberg) -- Top U.S. health experts seeking to join an international group heading to the center of the coronavirus outbreak in China said they still have no answer on whether they’ll be allowed into the country.

U.S. officials have said they’ve offered for weeks to send front-line disease experts to China to study the outbreak, which originated in the city of Wuhan, and consult with colleagues there on how to stop it.

“We haven’t been invited yet,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters Wednesday.

U.S. officials have repeatedly raised the Chinese non-response, pleading to get access on the ground. The latest offer by the U.S. would have experts from the CDC and the National Institutes of Health join an international delegation led by the World Health Organization.

“We’ve offered the Chinese the opportunity to have American doctors from CDC, NIH and others,” National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien said Tuesday evening in Washington. “That offer’s not been accepted at this point, but it’s an outstanding offer.”

The proposed U.S. delegation includes virologists, immunologists and clinical trial design experts from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, experts in vaccines and epidemiology, and staff who worked on past outbreaks such as SARS and Ebola, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A WHO advance team arrived in China on Monday, with more members scheduled to arrive in the coming days. A spokesperson for the WHO declined to comment on the status of the U.S. experts.

On the Ground

Chinese President Xi Jinping has said the country expects to defeat the virus and meet economic goals. Authorities in China have taken aggressive measures to stop its spread, locking down cities and putting in place mandatory health checks in many parts of the country to identify new cases.

A spokesman for the Chinese mission to the United Nations didn’t immediately respond an emailed request for comment.

U.S. experts have been getting access to some information coming out of China, where the coronavirus has infected more than 44,000 people and killed over 1,100. There are signs the infection may be slowing after drastic measures to cut off the region where the outbreak began, though CDC officials have said it’s too soon to know for sure.

“Seeing a graph that somebody else produced is never as good as touching the data yourself, being able to look at it yourself and being able to ask the questions of the data directly,” Messonnier said Wednesday. “Having that distance from the actual ongoing investigation in China or anywhere is never the best way for us to be completely confident that we understand the situation. That is part of the reason we want to have folks on the ground.”

The CDC also has staff permanently based in China. Those people have also not been allowed to the outbreak’s center, said Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Hopefully we will see a change in that right now but right now we don’t have people there,” Fauci said Tuesday.

--With assistance from Robert Langreth, John Lauerman and David Wainer.

To contact the reporters on this story: Michelle Fay Cortez in Minneapolis at mcortez@bloomberg.net;Josh Wingrove in Washington at jwingrove4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Drew Armstrong at darmstrong17@bloomberg.net, Timothy Annett

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