US increasingly excludes China from coronavirus research projects
- In April, the National Institutes of Health announced a public-private partnership to develop research strategy for treatments – China was not part of the group
- NIH also cut off funding for a coronavirus project New York-based EcoHealth Alliance had with Chinese research entities
In October 2003, Tommy Thompson, then the US Health and Human Services secretary, visited China in the wake of the Sars epidemic.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome, a fatal disease caused by a coronavirus, had emerged in China’s southern Guangdong province a year earlier, infecting 8,400 people and caused about 800 deaths globally. The US had 75 cases and no deaths.
In the years that followed, Thompson’s team partnered with the Chinese Ministry of Health, helping train thousands of public health staff and build a surveillance system that included hundreds of laboratories and hospitals. The system tested more than 20,000 influenza viruses each year and eventually provided the World Health Organisation with crucial vaccine strain information.
That was a different time. Today, as another coronavirus grips the world, Washington is looking the other way.
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In a race to develop a safe and effective vaccine that requires all available brainpower and resources to come together, the US government has increasingly excluded China from research projects internationally and domestically.
“This notion that we can just decouple from China, and go our own way especially on issues like a pandemic, just simply doesn't apply,” said Evan Medeiros, the Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, who also served as senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council under then president Barack Obama.