Coronavirus: US-China tensions simmer as UN chief calls for cooperation
- At Security Council talks, top US envoy stresses transparency, information sharing and access, while China’s foreign minister speaks out on ‘division’
- Pandemic has seen countries using the crisis to advance their own interests, or as ‘grist in the geopolitical mill’, analyst says
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for countries to work together at the meeting on Wednesday focused on global Covid-19 vaccine access.
“We can defeat this disease. We can get our economies running again. I am convinced it is possible. Let’s make it happen, together,” he said.
The international community faces looming challenges with gaping inequities in the vaccine roll-outs needed to ease the crisis and the global economy in its sharpest contraction since the Great Depression nearly a century ago, with observers saying cooperation is critical.
He also called for all countries – now and in the future – to “make available all data from the earliest days of any outbreak” to better understand the pandemic and prepare for the next one.