Below is an excerpt of his article published on February 28:
In any crisis, countries have two equally important responsibilities to fulfill: solving immediate problems and preventing them from recurring.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a case in point.
Maximizing disease prevention is a long-term challenge.
We face an immediate crisis.
Medical staff at Wuhan City Hospital wear protective goggles before entering the quarantine area.
There are two reasons why we worry that Covid-19 is that threat.
Besides, nCoV spreads quite quickly.
The world needs to speed up the process of developing vaccines and finding methods to treat the disease.
The drug testing process is also being promoted based on the compound bank, applying new screening techniques including artificial intelligence, to identify potential antiviral drugs.
One of the technical challenges in vaccine preparation is improving old protein production methods, which are too slow to respond to pandemics.
This process requires government funding, because developing pandemic response products is a risky investment.
Governments and the pharmaceutical industry need to come to an agreement that in the fight against the pandemic, vaccines cannot be sold only to the highest bidder.