WHO ‘must be handed all the evidence’ from China

BRITAIN ‘shares concerns’ about the level of access given to the World Health Organization during its coronavirus fact-finding mission to China, Dominic Raab has said.

Echoing criticism by the US, the foreign secretary said it was necessary the WHO was given full cooperation from the Chinese authorities.

‘We’ll be pushing for it to have full access [and] get all the data it needs to be able to answer the questions that I think most people want to hear answered around the outbreak,’ Mr Raab told the BBC.

The White House has called on China to make available data from the earliest days of the Covid-19 outbreak, saying it had ‘deep concerns’ about the way the findings of the WHO’s report were communicated.

Meanwhile, a member of the delegation said that, while Chinese authorities had not given them all raw data, they had seen a lot of information and discussed analysis of the first cases.

‘It would be unusual for them to hand over the raw data but we looked at a great deal of information in detail in discussion with the Chinese counterparts,’ epidemiologist Prof John Watson told the BBC. Australian microbiologist Prof Dominic Dwyer (pictured), who also travelled as part of the team, said on Saturday China had refused access to all the data requested, providing instead only a summary.

China has not responded to the allegation but has previously insisted it was transparent about its data. Last week, the WHO team concluded it was ‘extremely unlikely’ the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where it was first detected in late 2019.