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WASHINGTON: The White House on Saturday (February 13) asked China to make available data from the first days of the COVID-19 outbreak, saying it has “deep concerns” about how the findings of the COVID-19 report of the World Health Organization were communicated.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that it is imperative that the report be independent and free from “disruption by the Chinese government,” echoing concerns raised by the former president’s administration. Donald Trump, who also decided to resign from the WHO. about the topic.
A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy responded with a forceful statement, saying that the United States had damaged multilateral cooperation and the WHO in recent years, and should not “point the finger” at China and other countries that supported the WHO during COVID. 19 pandemic.
China welcomed the US decision to re-engage with the WHO, but Washington should adhere to the “highest standards” rather than target other countries, the spokesman said.
READ: China refused to provide WHO team with raw data on early COVID-19 cases: Researcher
READ: WHO says all hypotheses are still open in research on COVID-19 origins
WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday that all hypotheses are still open about the origins of COVID-19, after Washington said it wanted to review data from a WHO-led mission to China, where the virus emerged for the first time.
A WHO-led mission, which spent four weeks in China investigating the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak, said this week that it was not further investigating the question of whether the virus escaped from a laboratory, which it considered highly unlikely.
The Trump administration had said it suspected the virus may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory, which Beijing flatly denies.
Sullivan noted that US President Joe Biden had quickly reversed the decision to disengage from the WHO, but said it was imperative to protect the credibility of the organization.
“Re-engaging WHO also means holding it to the highest standards,” Sullivan said. “We have deep concerns about the way the first COVID-19 research findings were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.”
Biden, who is spending his first weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in the mountains of western Maryland, will meet with his national security advisers on Saturday, a White House official said.
READ: What WHO experts on COVID-19 learned in Wuhan
READ: WHO mission to China does not find the source of the coronavirus
China declined to provide raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team investigating the origins of the pandemic, according to one of the team’s researchers, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began. .
The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified since the initial phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, Dominic Dwyer, a contagious Australian. disease expert who is a member of the WHO team, he told Reuters.
“It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government,” Sullivan said.
“To better understand this pandemic and prepare for the next one, China must make its data available from the first days of the outbreak,” he said.
No comment was immediately available from the Chinese embassy in Washington or the WHO.
Going forward, all countries, including China, must engage in a robust and transparent process to prevent and respond to health emergencies, Sullivan said.
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