Geneva: A World Health Organization (WHO) team due to investigate the origins of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) in Wuhan city has been denied entry to China.
Two members had already set out on their journey – one has now turned back and the other is in transit in a third country, the BBC reported on Wednesday.
The WHO said the problem was a lack of visa clearances.
The long-awaited probe was agreed upon by Beijing in December after many months of negotiations with the WHO.
The virus was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019, with the initial outbreak linked to a market.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “very disappointed” that China had not yet finalised the permissions for the team’s arrivals “given that two members had already begun their journeys and others were not able to travel at the last minute”.
“I have been assured that China is speeding up the internal procedure for the earliest possible deployment,” he told reporters in Geneva…