U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, acting in the stead of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is recovering from a terrible battle with coronavirus, said on Thursday that Great Britain will not revert to doing “business as usual” with China once the coronavirus pandemic is over.
Speaking at a press conference, Raab stated, according to The Independent:
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 … We will look very carefully with all our the other international partners, and the World Health Organization and other international organizations as to how this outbreak happened and what can be done to prevent it happening in the future. Until we get those answers, we can’t really track a way forward.
Raab added, “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. We will have to ask the hard questions about how it come about and why it couldn’t have been stopped earlier,” according to Bloomberg News. He added, “The one thing the coronavirus has taught us is the value and the importance of international cooperation.”
On Wednesday, William Hague, a former Tory leader, fired that China does not “play by our rules.” Bloomberg News reported, “The U.K. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has warned that an orchestrated disinformation campaign by China is ‘costing British lives’ in the fight against coronavirus. In the report, lawmakers said China sought to ‘obfuscate’ what was really happening when the outbreak began, when it should have played a key role in collecting data on its spread.”
At the end of March, Business Insider reported, “UK government officials are accusing China of spreading disinformation about the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in its borders.” The Daily Wire noted that the U.K.’s Minister for the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove. told the BBC, “It was the case … [that] the first case of coronavirus in China was established in December of last year, but it was also the case that some of the reporting from China was not clear about the scale, the nature, the infectiousness of this.” One official in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration said bluntly, “There has to be a reckoning when this is over.” Another added, “The anger goes right to the top.”
“British officials who declined to be named point to what they see as a statistical impossibility that China, whose health services were the first in the world to confront the virus at a time when few knew what it was and whose population is more than twice the size of the population of the European continent combined, still managed to report death numbers which are less than a quarter those recorded in a single European country such as Britain or France,” the Straits Times reported on Thursday.