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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticized China for its handling the COVID-19 pandemic. He said that it failed to cooperate and be as transparent as possible in the early days of the outbreak. Blinken said that there needs to be a more thorough investigation into where the coronavirus originated and how it spread so rapidly. He said, “I think China knows that in the early stages of COVID, it didn’t do what it needed to do, which was to, in real-time, give access to international experts, in real-time to share information, in real-time to provide real transparency. And one result of that failure is that the vaccine, the virus, excuse me, got out of hand faster and with I think much more egregious results than it might otherwise”.

Blinken said that Beijing’s attitude helped the coronavirus spread more quickly. He didn’t answer whether he believes China knows more than it is saying about how the virus originated but did state that the pandemic should be the jumping-off point to build a stronger global health security system to try to prevent, or at least mitigate future pandemics. He added, “That means making a real commitment to transparency, to information sharing, to access for experts. It means strengthening the World Health Organization and reforming it so it can do that.  And China has to play a part in that. We need to get to the bottom of this. We need to do that precisely so we fully understand what happened, in order to have the best shot possible preventing it from happening again”.

The words of Blinken marked a more diplomatic turn from his predecessor. But it still signaled that President Joe Biden’s administration is skeptical of China’s official narrative about how the pandemic started. He warned that the United States is concerned about China’s aggressive moves against Taiwan. Blinken said it would be a serious mistake for anyone to try to change the existing status quo by force. He added, “All I can tell you, we have a serious commitment to Taiwan being able to defend. The United States has real concerns about Russia’s actions near the border with Ukraine. The question is, ‘is Russia going to continue to act aggressively and recklessly?’ If it does, the President has been clear, there’ll be costs, and there’ll be consequences”.