Interview: China, U.S. could resume health cooperation, says U.S. expert

Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University, speaks in an interview with Xinhua in South Orange, New Jersey, the United States, Dec. 9, 2022. (Xinhua/Liu Yanan)

NEW YORK, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- If China and the United States could restart bilateral dialogue and cooperation in public health, they would make a big contribution to global health security, a U.S.-based expert on global health governance has said.

China has made a great contribution to narrowing "vaccine apartheid" by supplying COVID-19 vaccines to many other countries, said Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations in a recent interview with Xinhua.

During the recent G20 summit in Indonesia, Chinese and U.S. leaders reached common understanding on conducting dialogue and cooperation in public health, agriculture and food security, and agreed to make good use of the China-U.S. joint working group to promote the resolution of more issues.

However, political and ideological factors now still pose quite a big challenge to global cooperation on public health, and in particular, efforts should be made to prevent the influence of such factors on pandemic response, said Huang, who is also director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University.

He said he was not very optimistic that the next pandemic could be addressed effectively due to challenges to global cooperation from politics and ideology and the lack of funding in capacity-building within the public health sector.

Developing countries and low-income countries do not have sufficient resources and there is no high expectation of foreign aid, added Huang.

"Old problems and challenges would continue to plague the whole international community," said Huang.

But he noted that there are a number of areas for cooperation like the prevention of zoonotic spillover events, regulation on trade of wild animals, sharing of pathogen samples, tracking of viral strains as well as development and sharing of vaccines.