No reason US and China can’t renew cooperation in health sciences and combating opioid misuse

Renewal of the agreement, set for this August, is being debated in the United States. The debate has been in the news because the last renewal, in 2018, slipped through the “maximum pressure” campaign of Donald Trump’s administration.

In the more recent years, however, government-endorsed health science cooperation has suffered from a drastic curtailment. Part of the cause is that, in the 2000s, increasing levels of US procurement of medicine – generic drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients – from China grew to be a political issue. Ascertaining the degree of US dependence is a complex task in and of itself.

Worse still, along with concerns about dependence in supply came worries about the weaponisation of drug exports by China, which grew louder as the tit-for-tat trade tariffs and export restrictions kicked into full gear in 2019. So far, though, there is no evidence of either side treating trade in medicine or medical products as a national security issue.

However, adding to the complexity is the fact that national security has crept into what is left of collaboration among the health sectors of the two countries. As participants in the China-US Track II dialogue on healthcare wrote in their 2022 agreement, “both [the American and Chinese] governments have restricted the exchange of data and research based on data security and more broadly national security concerns, with often vague definitions of the terms”.

Still, there is no reason not to renew the agreement – all things considered, progress in medicinal and medical sciences ought to prevail. Even during times of high tensions between the two countries, China’s status as one of the world’s most populous nations makes it a rich source of medicinal and medical data for researchers and developers in the US. This fact defies diplomatic preferences.

Equally significant for China, the Biden administration’s identification of biotech as a target for “de-risking” should not limit the space for cooperation with anyone, including the US. Good-faith negotiations towards renewal of the agreement is the right thing to do for the sake of public health protection and improvement of its own population.