Leading health experts from the United States and China have agreed during a webinar to act together and follow scientific guidance in the fight against COVID-19, the event’s organiser said.
“They exchanged opinions and reached a very positiveconclusion in the end, as Professor Barry Bloom from Harvard said that healthcare is local, but health research is global. The world must rely on scientificmethods to deal with the pandemic. We must also use scientific methods to findthe origin of the virus,” said Florence Fang, co-founder of thenewly-established, non-profit Global Alliance to Combat COVID-19 (GACC) onFriday, Xinhua news agency reported.
“If we want to win this war against the coronavirus, wemust work together globally and not be misled by the misinformation of allkinds. We must listen to scientific information and let science tell us what todo. This is the consensus that we have reached at this webinar,” Fangsaid.
Chinese keynote speakers at the webinar included ZhongNanshan, a renowned respiratory specialist and an academician at the ChineseAcademy of Engineering; Qiao Jie, president of the Peking University ThirdHospital and also an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering; andZhang Wenhong, head of Shanghai’s COVID-19 clinical experts team.
They were joined by Barry Bloom, former dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School ofPublic Health; and Brian Bosworth, chief of medicine at New York UniversityLangone Health’s Tisch Hospital.
According to Fang, the webinar received a lot of feedbackfrom some US officials. “I had a call with California Lieutenant GovernorEleni Kounalakis. She expressed her support and thanks for this activity,”Fang told Xinhua in an online interview.
“One of the purposes to organize this webinar is topromote Sino-US relations and understanding. We should join our forces to actagainst common threats. We cannot fight separately, not to mention fightingeach other,” Fang added.
Fang said she is already planning another online forum forChinese and American experts to focus on vaccine development against thecoronavirus.
The GACC, which aims at building a collaborative environmentfor top health care experts around the world to share experience and offertechnical support, will organize a series of online forums and seminars in thenear future. The target audience of the events will mainly be health careprofessionals and policymakers, with selected events open to the public,according to Fang.
“This pandemic will pass, but human health will remaina global issue,” said Fang, who is also co-founder and vice chairwoman ofthe George H.W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations.The foundation launched the US-China CoronavirusAction Network in January, with Fang as chair, to join the world in fightingthe COVID-19 pandemic, and to bolster Us-China friendship and cooperation.