President Biden said Saturday the United States has offered vaccines to North Korea and China to help fight COVID-19 outbreaks, but neither has responded.
“The answer is yes we’ve offered vaccines, not only to North Korea but to China as well,” Biden said at a joint press conference in Seoul with the South Korean president. “And we’re prepared to do that immediately. We’ve gotten no response.”
North Korea has long been isolated from the rest of the world, and the secretive government did not report any coronavirus cases for much of the first two years of the pandemic. But in recent weeks, the country has seen an outbreak of hundreds of thousands of cases and dozens of deaths from the virus, according to state media, triggering concern from the international community given North Korea’s limited access to outside medicine and its fragile health care system.
In a joint statement following a one-on-one meeting, Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said they would work to provide humanitarian aid to vulnerable North Koreans, despite tensions between the nations and concerns over missile tests by Pyongyang.
China similarly saw a large spike in COVID-19 cases earlier this month. The country has typically imposed a “zero-COVID” strategy that includes harsh lockdowns and other restrictive measures in a bid to eliminate the virus dating back to the original outbreak in Wuhan.
U.S. officials have worked to share vaccine doses with developing nations and other parts of the world, with experts noting that an unvaccinated global population will give the virus more opportunity to mutate and become more contagious or possibly more deadly.