Creating Common Ground With Chinese Researchers

In 2006, China's biomedical sector was the ninth largest in the world. By 2021, it had become the second largest, after the US. In the context of the increasing global importance of scientific collaboration, China's rapid advance--the nation is now the world's second largest investor in science--provides good reason to engage with Chinese scientists. But growing political tensions and censorship since the COVID-19 pandemic have made it increasingly difficult for Western scientists to engage with their counterparts in China--and have all but brought inperson meetings to a standstill. They argue that it is precisely because of these circumstances that a concerted effort must be made to engage in sustained dialogue with Chinese scientists. Such initiatives can promote mutual understanding and the development of shared scientific values, an outcome that would be beneficial to all parties, as it can raise awareness and understanding of scientific norms--as well as what constitutes misbehavior--in China and in the West. Furthermore, these conversations can serve as foundations for developing mutually fruitful, cooperative scientific projects when political tensions die down.

Will Health Diplomacy from the South Balance Global Inequality?

[...]when at the beginning of 2021, Western countries were criticized for creating unprecedented inequality by hoarding billions of doses of excess vaccines with an ambiguous timeline to share with developing countries, China and Russia projected themselves as coming to the rescue by shipping their vaccines to developing and underdeveloped countries.1 Prior to its devastating second wave of infections, India, a country that contributes to 60 percent of the world's vaccine production, was set to become a benchmark in vaccine distribution. In his notorious five-page letter sent in April 2000 to President Clinton and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Mbeki drew on the history of apartheid to defend his description of Western medical consensus as "intellectual intimidation and terrorism" which superimposes antiretroviral drugs to Black people to benefit Western pharmaceutical companies.8 South Africa's subsequent institutional denial of treatment to AIDS patients was later estimated to have caused approximately 350,000 avoidable deaths.9 There is an unsettling resemblance between the South African Health Minister's comparison of antiretroviral HIV treatments to "poison" twenty years ago10 and the January 2021 statements of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who stated UK and U.S. vaccines are "completely untrustworthy. [End Page 288] For example, Turkish, Brazilian, and Indonesian health officials cast doubts over the Sinovac vaccine's efficacy after trials reported results ranging from 50.4 percent to 91.25 percent efficacy.17 Instead of focusing on explaining methodological differences in the three countries that contributed to the varied efficacy, China launched an aggressive disinformation campaign to undermine public trust in the vaccine developed by Germany's BioNTech with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. In a concerted effort, leading Chinese national papers criticized the Western media's downplaying of possible serious side effects and urged Australia to halt its use of the Pfizer vaccine.18 Similarly, Russia smeared the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine as the "chimpanzee vaccine" until a memorandum of cooperation was signed to test if a combination with Sputnik V would further boost efficacy.19 India's vaccine diplomacy is similarly steered by "counter-moves."

To Procrastinate or Not to Procrastinate: A Retrospective Study of the Optimal Timing of Containing the Global Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

As global public health is under threat by the 2019-nCoV and a potential new wave of large-scale epidemic outbreak and spread is looming, an imminent question to ask is what the optimal strategy of epidemic prevention and control (P&C) measures would be, especially in terms of the timing of enforcing aggressive policy response so as to maximize health efficacy and to contain pandemic spread. Based on the current global pandemic statistic data, here we developed a logistic probability function configured SEIR model to analyse the COVID-19 outbreak and estimate its transmission pattern under different "anticipate- or delay-to-activate" policy response scenarios in containing the pandemic. We found that the potential positive effects of stringent pandemic P&C measures would be almost canceled out in case of significantly delayed action, whereas a partially procrastinatory wait-and-see control policy may still be able to contribute to containing the degree of epidemic spread although its effectiveness may be significantly compromised compared to a scenario of early intervention coupled with stringent P&C measures. A laissez-faire policy adopted by the government and health authority to tackling the uncertainly of COVID19-type pandemic development during the early stage of the outbreak turns out to be a high risk strategy from optimal control perspective, as significant damages would be produced as a consequence.