China’s failure to share information and provide access to international public health experts in the early stages of the pandemic fueled the global crisis, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday.
“I think China knows that in the early stages of COVID, it didn’t do what it needed to do,” Blinken said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And one result of that failure is that the (virus) got out of hand faster and with, I think, much more egregious results than it might otherwise.”
The secretary pledged that the U.S. will be “the world leader on helping to make sure the entire world gets vaccinated.”
Blinken said the pandemic revealed the need for a “stronger global health security system to make sure that this doesn’t happen again” to ensure that the world can mitigate public health crises. Blinken said the World Health Organization must be strengthened and reformed, and that “China has to play a part in that.”
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