Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic are leaving 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 Minister Dominic Raab said on Sunday that he shared concerns about the level of access given to a fact-finding mission by the World Health Organization COVID-19 in China, repeating criticism from the United States.
The White House on Saturday called on China to provide data from the first days of the new coronavirus outbreak, saying it has “deep concerns” about how the findings of the WHO COVID-19 report were communicated.
Asked about the US reaction, Raab told the BBC: “We share the concern that they will get full cooperation and get the answers they need, so we will press for it to have full access, to get all the data it needs. to be able to answer the questions that I think most people want to hear answers around the outbreak. “
In a separate BBC interview, a member of the WHO delegation in China said that while the Chinese authorities did not give them all the raw data, they saw 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 analyzed a lot of information in discussions with 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 had denied access to all requested data.