Coronavirus: US and China should join forces to find the animal host, top Chinese scientists say
- Collaboration is also needed to speed vaccine manufacture and distribution, they add
- Call comes after US rejected findings from World Health Organization mission to Wuhan because China did not offer ‘requisite transparency’
China and the United States should work together to find the animal host of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, two top Chinese scientists said on Monday.
Speaking at a webinar held by the Brookings Institution, George Gao Fu, director of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Zhong Nanshan, China’s top respiratory expert, also called for the two countries to cooperate in accelerating the manufacture and distribution of vaccines, the better to shorten the time for the world to reach herd immunity.
“We thought there might be a reservoir host,” Gao said, using the scientific term for an animal that sustains a parasite virus and is a source of infection of humans.
“But after one year of hard work, we have not found any reservoir host. Also, we cannot find any intermediate host. That is why we have to come to the science on the origin of the virus,” he added.
“For that, China and the US need to work together.”
The calls for China-US collaboration by the two Chinese government-affiliated scientists followed a World Health Organization (WHO) mission to Wuhan to search for the origin of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in February.
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The US, however, said it would not accept the WHO findings without independently verifying them using its own intelligence and conferring with allies. State Department spokesman Ned Price said that China had not offered the “requisite transparency” the US sought.