The United States and China have reasons and must cooperate now to stop the COVID-19 pandemic which has entered its second year with new variants emerging around the world, scholars said in an article Tuesday.
"The urgent task of bringing the pandemic under control can only be accomplished through global coordination, which requires the active engagement of the two largest economies in the world," said an article co-authored by Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center with the U.S. think tank Brookings Institution, and Ryan McElveen, associate director of the center.
"Here are ten reasons that the U.S. and China must cooperate now to stop the pandemic," they said in the article on the website of the Brookings Institute.
First, the United States and China should resume the tradition of public health cooperation, they said, noting that the two countries have a long history of collaborating to combat virtually every global health crisis of the past half century, including HIV/AIDS, SARS, avian flu and Ebola.
Second, the two countries should retain strong ties within the medical community despite the political barriers undermining governmental cooperation, they said, as medical experts and scientists on both sides have maintained extensive and dynamic communication and collaboration throughout the COVID-19 crisis.
The two countries also should coordinate to improve transparency and data sharing, establish a global surveillance network for variants, develop mutually beneficial competition on vaccine development, increase vaccine manufacturing capacity for the world, and enhance an equitable international distribution of vaccines, among others, the two scholars said.
