China Daily Editorial: “Biden Has Not Brought America Back”

A May 19 editorial published by China Daily reached the conclusion that, despite Biden’s campaign promises to “bring America back,” this hasn’t happened. The editorial notes that there were hopes and expectations internationally when Biden first came in, that “the United States was ready to play a more constructive role in the international arena” than had occurred under previous administrations. “Yet four months after taking office, Biden seems to have squandered both the opportunity and the goodwill. On vaccines, he obviously has not deviated much from the course of `vaccine nationalism’ set by the Donald Trump administration — by continuing to hoard the vaccines and holding back raw materials needed for vaccine production, even though the US has already secured enough supplies to vaccinate its population multiple times.” The editorial cited a recent Foreign Policy magazine article which commented that “Biden’s flashy posturing on waiving vaccine patents obscures the very inconvenient fact that it’s actual shipments of doses that save lives,” and then goes on to note that “the number of doses the US has shared with the rest of the world is a miserly 3 million, as compared with around 200 million the European Union has shipped to non-EU countries.”