Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday rejected as counterproductive attempts to blame Beijing for delaying informing the world about the coronavirus, the Kremlin said.

Putin and Xi spoke after US President Donald Trump's administration berated China for not sharing data more quickly.

Washington is also investigating the origins of the coronavirus — which has killed more than 140,000 people worldwide — saying it doesn't rule out that the disease came from a laboratory researching bats in Wuhan, China.

The Kremlin said that during phone calls with Xi on Thursday, Putin praised "consistent and effective actions" of the Chinese "which allowed the epidemiological situation in the country to stabilise."

The leaders did not refer to the White House directly but stressed the "counterproductiveness" of attempts to blame China for not informing the world quickly enough about the appearance of a dangerous new infection.

Xi called attempts to politicise the pandemic "detrimental to international cooperation," according to a Chinese readout of the call reported by state-run Xinhua.

Xinhua also reported that Putin had called "attempts by some people to smear China" over the virus "unacceptable."

Since emerging in China at the end of last year, the pandemic has turned the world upside down, forcing half of humanity indoors and sending the global economy into freefall.

Putin and Xi also stressed the two countries' "strategic partnership" and said Russia and China were ready to help each other during the pandemic by exchanging specialists and supplying medical equipment, protective gear and medicines, the Kremlin said.

"The two leaders expressed confidence that our countries will be able to successfully overcome the pandemic-related challenges by continuing to closely cooperate," Putin's office said.

Macron says things 'happened we don't know about' in China virus handling
Paris (AFP) April 16, 2020 –

French President Emmanuel Macron said there were grey areas in China's handling of the coronavirus outbreak and that things "happened that we don't know about", speaking in an interview with the Financial Times published Thursday.

"Let's not be so naive as to say it's been much better at handling this," he said of China's management of the outbreak.

"We don't know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don't know about."

The United States and Britain took a tougher line on China, where the coronavirus outbreak emerged in December.

"We'll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn't have been stopped earlier," British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said at a press conference Friday when asked about future relations with Beijing.

Raab is standing in for Prime Minister Boris Johnson who is recovering from COVID-19.

US President Donald Trump's administration is investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, saying it does not rule out that it came from a laboratory researching bats in Wuhan, China.

Chinese scientists have said the virus, which has killed more than 140,000 people worldwide, was likely transmitted to humans late last year at a Wuhan "wet market" that slaughtered exotic animals — a longtime focus of concern for public health experts.

But The Washington Post and Fox News both quoted anonymous sources who voiced concern that the virus may have come — accidentally — from a sensitive bioresearch centre in the city.

Trump, asked about the laboratory theory at a news conference on Wednesday, said that "more and more, we're hearing the story" and that the United States was "doing a very thorough investigation."