Democracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion The U.S.-China collaboration on health collapsed under Trump. This is the cost.

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February 28, 2020 at 1:03 p.m. EST
A Health and Human Services staff member stands in front of a coronavirus global map during a tour of the "secretary's operation center" as part of a coronavirus task force meeting at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington on Thursday. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Deborah Seligsohn is an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. She served as environment, science, technology and health counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing from 2003 to 2007.

If you focus only on economics and forget about public health, you risk sacrificing both. And yet, in the past few years, the U.S. government has walked away from the critically important cooperation with China on infectious diseases. We should know better.