Secretary of State Antony Blinken dodged questions about whether the Biden administration plans to apply pressure to communist China to cooperate with an investigation into COVID-19 and its origins.
“Will you demand that? Will you put teeth on it? Will you even go as far as sanctions on China if they keep inspectors out,” Axios co-founder Mike Allen asked Blinken.
Blinken agreed that the world requires transparency about the creation and spread of the deadly virus but refused to give a direct answer when Allen pressed him for a more substantive plan for action.
“I think the international community is clear that we have to have, the international community has to have access. It has to have information,” Blinken said.
“What’s the real pressure the U.S. will put on China for access to the lab?” Allen continued.
Secretary of State Blinken can’t name any “real pressure” Biden will apply on China for COVID-19 obstruction pic.twitter.com/teE278sY6Y
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 7, 2021
Instead of committing to pushing China to give other countries access to investigate the origins of COVID-19 associated with its spread, Blinken said the communist nation should simply agree with releasing the data because China also suffered during the pandemic.
“At the end of the day, it is profoundly in China’s interest to do this as well because it’s suffered too in the outbreak of this pandemic,” Blinken said. “It presumably has an interest as well.”
Allen noted that the United States “expects” China to lie about COVID-19 as it has done for over a year, but Blinken said that “especially if it purports to be a responsible international actor,” transparency is in China’s best interest. The East-Asian country, Blinken said, should “do everything it can to provide all the information it has to make sure we can hopefully prevent this from happening again.”
The debate surrounding the origins of COVID-19 rages on as more evidence suggests Anthony Fauci knew about U.S. funding for the gain of function research occurring at the Wuhan lab in China but downplayed its role in the COVID-19 pandemic.
