Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic Covid-19 leave the Jade Hotel in a bus after completing their quarantine in Wuhan, China’s central Hubei province on January 28, 2021.
HECTOR RETAMAL | AFP | Getty Images
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Sunday that he shared his concerns about the level of access being granted to a World Health Organization COVID-19 fact-finding mission to China, echoing criticism from the United States.
The White House on Saturday called on China to make available data from the earliest days of the new coronavirus outbreak, saying it was “deeply concerned” about how the findings of the WHO’s COVID-19 report were being communicated.
When asked about the US response, Raab told the BBC, “We share concerns that they will get full cooperation and that they will get the answers they need, and so we will insist that it get full access, get all data who needs it. to be able to answer the questions I think most people want to hear around the outbreak.
In a separate BBC interview, a member of the WHO delegation in China said that although the Chinese authorities had not provided them with all the raw data, they had seen a lot of information and discussed the analysis of the first cases.
“It would be unusual for them to hand over the raw data, but we looked at a lot of information in detail in consultation with the Chinese counterparts,” said John Watson, an epidemiologist who traveled to China as part of the WHO team.
On Saturday, Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious disease expert who is also a member of the team, said China has refused access to all requested data.