Trump and Biden's fight to prove who's more anti-China is a major hurdle to a coronavirus vaccine

• President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have been fighting to prove who is more anti-China in an effort to win over voters, as anger toward Beijing over coronavirus grows in the US.
• But attacking China in this way could stifle efforts in the development of a vaccine, and put the US at a disadvantage if China develops one first, global health experts and former US officials warn.
• "If we have spent six to nine months lobbing accusations back and forth with China about who's at fault for this, and then China is the first place to get the vaccine, then we're going to be in a pretty rough spot," Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw the Obama administration's response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, told Insider.
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As the coronavirus pandemic sets the tone of the 2020 presidential race, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are locking horns in a fight to prove who's the bigger China hawk.

This jingoistic competition could hinder the development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, and hurt America's ability to gain access if China develops one first, former US officials and global health experts warn.

"Who in the world gets the first 100 million doses of that vaccine is going to be very, very contentious. And if we've been fighting for months and months over this already it could get very ugly at that point," Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told Insider.

Playing the blame game while the pandemic is ongoing is counterproductive, said Konyndyk, who oversaw the Obama administration's response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as director for foreign disaster assistance at USAID.

"If we have spent six to nine months lobbing accusations back and forth with China about who's at fault for this, and then China is the first place to get the vaccine, then we're going to be in a pretty rough spot," Konyndyk said. "We have a strong self-interest in global cooperation because we don't know who's going to reach a vaccine first ... It's kind of a roll of the dice."

'This is not the time to start picking fights with the main supplier of the ingredients you will need'

The US is heavily dependent on China for vital pharmaceutical products, and the Chinese are among the frontrunners in the rapid-moving race to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19.

"This is not the time to start picking fights with the main supplier of the ingredients you will need to produce a COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccine production, like this pandemic, has shown us that we are interconnected," Kelley Lee, research chair in global health governance at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, told Insider. "Trump's chest thumping policies might play out well for some Americans domestically, but it makes no sense during a global pandemic."

"The Chinese government has been putting huge resources, including military scientists, into a COVID-19 vaccine. They may well come up with the first viable vaccine," Lee said, adding that developing a vaccine has become a point of national pride for China, comparing it to the "Space Race" between the US and USSR during the Cold War.

It's unlikely China will completely withhold vaccine supplies from the US if it develops one first, Lee said, but added that Beijing might prioritize helping a lot of other countries first.

"What will happen when the first effective vaccines are available? Supplies will be limited initially as it takes time to produce large quantities...The US is the current epicenter of COVID-19 but it might not be in a year or so. Many countries in the developing world may be in dire need by then. There may arguably be a bigger need in those countries for a vaccine," Lee said. "So that's a lot of people who may be ahead of Americans in the queue."

Trump and Biden are battling to prove who's the bigger China hawk, but it's not helping anyone.

Though Trump was applauding Beijing's handling of the outbreak in January and throughout February, the president has since shifted to blaming it for the global spread of the virus while accusing Biden of being too soft on China.

Biden has fired back, releasing a campaign ad that highlighted his criticism of China on the campaign trail, while zeroing in on the president's flattery of China and its leadership.

With so many documented examples of Trump praising China and conflicting his own advisers, the issue has become a liability for the president during an election year.

In recent weeks, congressional Republicans and evangelical leaders who are crucial to Trump's base have ramped up calls for China to be held accountable for the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, recent polling shows Biden leading Trump nationally in the 2020 race, alongside growing levels of disapproval among voters over the president's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

In this context, Trump has been pushing the idea that he is the bigger China hawk, and that Beijing would prefer Biden was elected. "China wants Sleepy Joe sooo badly," Trump tweeted on Saturday. "Joe is an easy mark, their DREAM CANDIDATE!"

'Trump's approach has crystallized into a form of medical nationalism'

As part of his newfound anti-China stance, Trump earlier this month defied the advice of global health experts and announced plans to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing the organization of being too China-centric.

Trump's opposition to global cooperation and nationalistic approach to the coronavirus crisis is undermining the world's ability to effectively combat the pandemic, Dr. Jack Chow, who was a US ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush administration and a former WHO assistant director-general, told Insider.

Chow said Trump's "America First" doctrine has upended the era of global cooperation and converted America's international posture into one of "profound mistrust of how diplomacy was conducted in the past."

"Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Trump's approach has crystallized into a form of medical nationalism whereby countries fend for themselves in buying vital healthcare supplies and equipment," Chow said. "Rather than unifying countries against a common enemy, medical nationalism fragments countries into the haves and have-nots and it ultimately destroys the ability to mount a global health defense to any pathogen."

"Walls imposed against international cooperation in medical research will raise costs as work is duplicated and delay their creation," Chow added.

Global cooperation, including between the US and China, has sped up the development of past vaccines

As the 2020 campaign season takes a backseat to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden has presented himself as someone who would take China to task over its handling of the virus. The attack ad Biden released earlier this month features a clip of the former vice president in a February 25 debate stating that American health experts would be on the ground in China if he were president.

"I would be on the phone with China and making it clear we are going to need to be in your country, you have to be open, you have to be clear, we have to know what it's going on," Biden said. But China is led by an authoritarian who would not bend to the demands of the US, and it's difficult to believe Biden would be successful if he approached Beijing in this patronizing fashion.

Experts have said it could take at least 18 months for a coronavirus vaccine to be developed. Should Biden win the election in November, it's highly unlikely that a vaccine will be ready even by the time he takes office in January 2021. Along these lines, adopting a more diplomatic tone toward Beijing could be beneficial.

Global cooperation has generally always expedited the development of vaccines and other positive global public health outcomes. Even during the Cold War, when the USSR and the US were extraordinarily suspicious of one another, American and Soviet scientists worked together to develop and improve a polio vaccine.

"In the past, biomedical work was done in the open, premised on the free exchange of ideas towards a common humanitarian mission," Chow said, warning that the intrusion of politics into that realm risks severing "those cross national links" and could lead nations to "consolidate vaccine production as an intra-national, rather than an inter-national, endeavor."

During the H1N1 flu, when Biden was vice president, there was a strong spirit of cooperation between the US and China, which aided in the development of a vaccine.

Chinese President Hu Jintao of China in May 2009 called President Barack Obama and expressed his "sincere condolences" for the H1N1 outbreak in the US. In November of that year, Obama and his Chinese counterpart vowed to "deepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control."

Diplomacy goes both ways, and China has not been particularly open to cooperation with the US amid the coronavirus pandemic. But embracing a hardline approach toward Beijing is unlikely to inspire more collaboration, nor will it bring the world closer to the end of this crisis.

"Global pandemics involving a communicable disease such as a coronavirus, by definition, pose shared risks to the health of everyone," Lee said. "We have a shared interest in dealing with this novel pathogen across all countries. It is a time to pool our resources, share knowledge, bring together the best minds, and accelerate the development and distribution of treatments and vaccines that will save us all."