WASHINGTON The United States and China should cooperate right away to stop the Covid-19 pandemic, two researchers with a Washington DC-based think tank have said. The urgent task of putting the Covid-19 under control "can only be accomplished through worldwide coordination, which requires the active engagement of the two largest economies in the world," wrote Cheng Li and Ryan McElveen with the Brookings Institution in a report published on Tuesday.

The scholars argued that the governments of the two countries have a long history of collaborating to fight global health crises such as SARS. Meanwhile, facing Covid-19, medical experts and scientists on both sides have preserved extensive communication and "cooperated on coronavirus research more with each other than with any other country," the Xinhua news agency reported.

The tradition of public health cooperation between Washington and Beijing and strong ties in the medical community lay the foundation for a return to US-China governmental cooperation.

As variants of the coronavirus are emerging around the world, it is essential to keep transparency and sharing of data, and establish a global surveillance network for tracing, screening and warning of the variants. These efforts should also be based on cooperation between the two sides, the scholars suggested.

Considering that vaccines are deemed as the ultimate solution to the crisis, the co-writers believe "the US and China should engage in positive competition and work together to promote effective vaccines platforms." They also called the two countries to jointly increase vaccine manufacturing capacity for the world and enhance equitable international distribution of doses.

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