Dominic Raab took aim at China tonight, warning the hardline Communist state faces ‘hard questions’ about the source of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Foreign Secretary and temporary United Kingdom (UK) leader said there would have to be a ‘deep dive’ into the facts around the outbreak, which started in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
After telling the nation it faces at least a further three weeks under lockdown he said that there could be no flinching from a hard examination of what had happened.
It came as Beijing today said the WHO has found no evidence coronavirus was man-made, fending off accusations that it was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan.
Taking questions this evening Mr Raab said: “I think there absolutely needs to be a very, very deep dive after the event review of the lessons – including of the outbreak of the virus – and I don’t think we can flinch from that at all, it needs to be driven by the science.”
He said the UK had good co-operation with China in relation to the return of UK nationals and in procurement of equipment.
‘So we ought to look at all sides of this and do it in a balanced way, but there is no doubt we can’t have business as usual after this crisis, and we will have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier.’
The Foreign Secretary and temporary UK leader said there would have to be a ‘deep dive’ into the facts around the outbreak, which started in the Chinese city of Wuhan
President Donald Trump said yesterday his government was ‘doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation’
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Chinese President Xi jinping before a meeting in Beijing in January. Mr Trump has accused the WHO of parroting erroneous information about the virus fed to it by China.
Trump halted $500 million of funding to the WHO this week and slammed the body that had ‘failed in its basic duty’ in its response to coronavirus by failing to stand up to China.
He said yesterday his government was ‘doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation,’ while US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Chinese ‘need to come clean’ on what they know.
But China‘s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told Thursday’s daily briefing that WHO officials ‘have said multiple times there is no evidence the new coronavirus was created in a laboratory.’