Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who traveled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday. The United States, the European Union, and other Western countries immediately called for China to give “full access” to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019. One of the team’s investigators has already said China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began. “In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data,” Tedros said. “We got access to quite a lot of data in many different areas, but of course there were areas where we had difficulties getting down to the raw data and there are many good reasons for that,” he said, citing privacy laws and other restrictions.

Source: The Star March 30, 2021 18:56 UTC