:quality(75)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/elcomercio/XFKREH2IZ5DSZKLDH75EQJQ5J4.jpg "The US describes China's rejection of new WHO research on the origin of Covid-19 as")
“We are deeply disappointed. Their stance is irresponsible and frankly dangerous,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at her daily press conference.
Psaki was referring to China’s response to the WHO’s request to begin the second phase of investigations into the origin of the coronavirus in China, which would include investigating markets and laboratories in Wuhan, the city where the first outbreaks were detected.
The deputy director of the National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, on Thursday described the WHO proposal as “arrogant” and “lacking in common sense” and asked the organization to strip its work of “political interference”.
In this regard, Psaki stressed that it is “crucial” that China provides access to “data and samples” in its territory so that the world can “understand” what happened and “prevent the next pandemic”.
“This is about saving lives in the future, and this is not the time to obstruct” the WHO investigations, added the spokeswoman for the president of the United States, Joe Biden.
Last week, the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, asked China “to be transparent and open” and “to cooperate especially by providing the raw data on the early days of the pandemic”.
Ghebreyesus assured that knowing the origins of the coronavirus “is an outstanding debt with millions of people who have suffered it.”
In February, the WHO mission in Wuhan requested access to the raw data of patients registered in the city’s hospitals with symptoms similar to those of the covid before the first known case of the disease, but China claimed that these already their experts had studied.