Britain said Saturday it will use the first leaders’ meeting of its G7 presidency next week to seek more global cooperation on coronavirus vaccine distribution and post-pandemic recovery plans. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson will host G7 heads of state for a virtual meeting on Friday, their first gathering since April 2020 and US President Joe Biden’s first major multilateral engagement since taking office last month.

They are meeting at a seaside retreat in Cornwall in southwestern England on June 11-13, after last year’s gathering in the United States was shelved because of the pandemic.

Iran’s health minister warned on Saturday of a fourth COVID-19 surge with the possible spread of a mutated virus in the worst-hit country in the Middle East.

President Hassan Rouhani told state television “alarm bells were ringing for a fourth coronavirus wave” as at least nine cities and towns in Iran’s southwest were declared high-risk “red” zones after a rise in cases on Friday.

“Hard days are beginning for us and you must prepare to fight the most uncontrollable mutated virus which is unfortunately infecting the country,” health minister Saeed Namaki told heads of medical colleges in a meeting carried live on state TV.

China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to a World Health Organization-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, one of the team’s investigators said, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began.

The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team.

Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.