Jake Sullivan Casts Doubt On WHO’s Wuhan Report, Says China Has Withheld Raw Data

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Sunday cast doubt on a forthcoming report from the World Health Organization’s investigation in Wuhan, China into the origins of the coronavirus.

“We believe that both the WHO and China should step up on this matter,” Sullivan said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

WHO recently completed a fact-finding mission to Wuhan to investigate several theories into the origins of the coronavirus, including that it jumped from an animal species to humans at one of Wuhan’s food markets, or that it started after a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Sullivan declined to endorse any of the theories, but said that the Chinese government has withheld raw data that would be crucial to WHO’s investigation.

“They’re about to come out with a report about the origins of the pandemic in Wuhan, China, that we have questions about,” Sullivan said of WHO, “because we do not believe that China has made available sufficient original data into how this pandemic began to spread both in China and then eventually around the world.”

Sullivan declined to say whether he thinks that WHO has been manipulated by China.

“What I am going to say is that the only way to have a scientifically based investigation is to have access to all of the data.”

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Sullivan also declined to comment on a Trump-era State Department claim that the U.S. government has evidence that the Chinese military was conducting experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic started.

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“This is why the WHO investigation has to be left to the scientists and the experts to lay out without any interference by any government, because that’s the only way we’re going to know what the origins of this are,” said Sullivan.

“I’m not in a position to say how COVID-19 came into this world. All I’m in a position to do is to call upon the WHO to do its job to the fullest extent possible.”

Sullivan said in a statement earlier this month that the Biden administration had “deep concerns” that the Chinese government was refusing to share raw data with the WHO team taken from early coronavirus patients.