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U.S. officials praise Chinese transparency on virus — up to a point

But China has also won praise for quickly putting crucial scientific information in the public domain. That’s “been a game changer,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine. Hotez has worked on vaccines for SARS and MERS, as well as on international vaccines initiatives in the Obama administration. Both of those diseases are also coronaviruses.

The World Health Organization went out of its way to compliment China Wednesday. The country has taken „extra ordinary measures in the face of what is an extraordinary challenge,“ said Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program.

Yet some gaps in information provided by the Chinese have started to emerge in recent days about a disease that has killed over 130 and sickened more than 6,000 in just a handful of weeks. The virus is concentrated in one Chinese province but has been detected in more than a dozen other countries — including the United States, where five cases have been confirmed.

CDC Director Robert Redfield and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci raised concerns at a Tuesday press conference that China has not provided the data to back up its claims that the virus may be transmissible from person to person before a patient exhibits any symptoms — in the so-called asymptomatic stage.

“We would really like to see the data, because if there is asymptomatic transmission, it impacts certain policies, screening,” Fauci said.

In addition, top U.S. health officials are pushing to get more access to samples of the virus, which would ensure the robustness of any treatments or vaccines developed for the disease, Azar said.

Experts are also watching to see if China shares any information on any vaccine or therapeutic candidates it is working on.

U.S. officials are engaging in a delicate balancing act, experts say, out of caution that any public criticism of China could lead the country to share less information, not more.

“Many government officials and other experts or policy folks actually have been pretty cautious about trying to impugn China for lack of transparency. In fact, we have been all, including me, very positive about the difference between today and what happened during SARS,” said Gerald Parker, associate dean for Global One Health at Texas A&M and former top career official in HHS’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response — a key player in responding to any global disease threat.

“I believe the U.S. government is praising them because they want to encourage China to provide access,” said Chris Meekins, who formerly served as the Trump administration’s No. 2 political official in that same HHS preparedness office known as ASPR.

But Meekins said the U.S. government can’t guarantee certain things, such as whether China is giving them the most recent samples of the virus, and simply has to trust China. And while there’s no doubt there’s been an improvement from the days of SARS, he said, “The bar was so incredibly low and the behavior was so incredibly bad” that it’s not hard for the Chinese to “surpass” that past precedent.

Public health officials, however, also acknowledge that it’s difficult for any government, no matter how well-meaning, to paint a perfectly accurate picture in the early days of an emerging disease outbreak. No matter how good the science, there are just a lot of unknowns.

“To some degree in the early days of any kind of outbreak like this, there is a fog of war where we just have incomplete information, and it takes time for the information to really unfold,” Parker said.

He is optimistic that information transparency will further improve if U.S. scientists can get on the ground saying American-Chinese relationships in the sector have improved over the years, leading to a new level of trust.

“Regardless of what’s happening geopolitically, scientists have a common language” that enables them to communicate and have trusted relationships irrespective of the broader political climate, Parker said.

Some of these Improvements have come, thanks to the Chinese’s government’s exponential investment in science that has fostered this international interaction.

“There is now very much a new tradition and nice tradition of scientific collaboration” between Chinese and American scientists, Hotez said.

Source: politico.com
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