French President Emmanuel Macron told the Australian prime minister now was not the time for an international investigation into the coronavirus pandemic and that the urgency was to act in unison before looking for who was at fault, an official said. 

"He says he agrees that there have been some issues at the start, but that the urgency is for cohesion, that it is no time to talk about this, while reaffirming the need for transparency for all players, not only the WHO," an Elysee official told Reuters on Wednesday. 

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has sought support for an international investigation into the pandemic in phone calls with U.S. President Donald Trump and the German and French leaders overnight, the government said on Wednesday. 

Morrison said on Twitter on Wednesday he had "a very constructive discussion" with Trump on the two nation's responses to COVID-19 and the need to get economies up and running. 

"We also talked about the WHO & working together to improve the transparency & effectiveness of the international responses to pandemics," he tweeted. 

In Berlin, the government confirmed that Merkel had spoken with Morrison on Tuesday. Last Friday, her spokesman said: "The coronavirus appeared first in China. China has suffered a lot from the virus and did a lot to fight against spreading."

The White House has been fiercely critical of China and the WHO, and has withdrawn U.S. funding from the UN agency. 

China's embassy in Canberra said in a statement late on Tuesday that Australian lawmakers were acting as the mouthpiece of Trump and "certain Australian politicians are keen to parrot what those Americans have asserted and simply follow them in staging political attacks on China." 

Noting that recently some people in the U.S., including high-level officials, have been spreading anti-China "information virus", the note stated that those people aim to shift blame and deflect attention by smearing China. 

(With input from Reuters)