President Joe Biden’s nominee for ambassador to China appeared to change his tone about the war of words between China and the United States on the coronavirus after he repeatedly criticized both sides for a “blame game” last year.

Nicholas Burns, an ambassador during the Clinton administration and a State Department official during George W. Bush’s presidency, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, with Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, highlighting comments the Harvard professor made in March 2020 in which he lamented: “Right now, we’re all witnessing a war of words. The Chinese have made a preposterous, untrue, and shameful assertion … They say that the crisis began because the U.S. army planted a weapon, a virus in the city of Wuhan. There is no basis for this … At the same time, President Trump personally calls this the ‘Chinese virus’ or the ‘Wuhan virus.’ We all know that’s wrong. We all know it’s racist. We all know it’s not true. The virus doesn’t know boundaries.”