Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic leave the Jade Hotel on a bus after completing its 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 World Health Organization’s COVID-19 investigation mission to China, echoing criticism from the United States.
The White House on Saturday asked China to make data available since the early days of the new coronavirus outbreak, saying it had “deep concerns” about how the findings in 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 full access, get all the data needed to be able to answer the questions that I think most people want to hear about the outbreak. “
In a separate interview with the BBC, a member of the WHO delegation to China said that while the Chinese authorities did not provide 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 examined a lot of information in detail in the discussion with Chinese colleagues,” said John Watson, an epidemiologist who traveled to China as part of the WHO team.
On Saturday, Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious disease specialist, who is also part of the team, said China had refused access to all requested data.