The hotel driveway is sealed off; guards watch the entrance. A mission by the World Health Organisation to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic got off to an inauspicious start in the Chinese city of Wuhan last week. Its international team of scientists, confined to their rooms by quarantine, might as well be in prison.
Meanwhile, on Friday, America again called for the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to be investigated as the possible source of the outbreak, claiming dramatically that it had “reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses”.
For the many critics of the WHO,
