Many scientists and research centers around the world are racing against time to discover an effective treatment and vaccine against the emerging corona virus (COFED-19), which has become a threat to humanity after it disrupted many walks of life, claimed tens of thousands of lives, and infected hundreds of thousands of people, since its appearance in China last December.
The American New York Times published a report for reporters. Matt Abuzo and David Kirkpatrick, entitled "Covid-19, changed the world’s view of science," in which they indicated that never before had so many experts in many countries insisted on a single topic of this. The level of urgency, to the point of disrupting all other research.
The administration of US President Donald Trump and the Chinese government has put research on the emerging corona virus a priority, as an urgent national necessity, sparking talk of a biotech arms race between Beijing and Washington, according to the report.
Unprecedented cooperation
The report pointed out that dealing with Covid-19 changed some of the priorities and necessities of work in research centers, such as abandoning the registration of scientific discoveries in the name of the discoverer. The centers and institutions published studies related to the virus via the Internet months before the publication of scientific journals that were supposed to be published The researchers identified hundreds of patterns of the virus's genetic sequence and shared it with their colleagues. More than two hundred clinical trials were launched in joint efforts between hospitals and laboratories around the world.
The report cited the opinion of Italian doctor Francesco Pironei, who is leading a clinical trial to treat a person with Coronavirus in Italy, who said, "I have never heard real and good scientists speaking from country affiliations," stressing that the real world does not take into account differences and narrow affiliations such as geographical location, country and language.
The report provided many examples of international cooperation between doctors and research efforts that are underway in various universities and major international centers, and cooperation between them in the battle against the deadly epidemic.
He pointed out in this context that researchers at the University of Oxford, who are developing a vaccine against the epidemic, recently benefited from the results of a test on laboratory animals conducted by the Rocky Mountain Laboratories of America, which shared its results with other research agencies.
A matter of survival
At the Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States, a team of Harvard doctors test the effectiveness of nitric oxide on patients with the virus, and the research is being carried out in cooperation with Xinging Hospital in China and two other hospitals in northern Italy.
According to Dr. Ryan Carroll, a professor of medicine at Harvard University who is involved in research related to the university's corona virus, the Corona pandemic has eradicated secrecy that has been the dominant feature of academic medical research. He explained that major exclusive research enables scientists to obtain financial grants and promotions, so scientists often surround their work with secrecy, and hide their findings from potential competitors.
He said, "The ability to work together, and to abandon the pursuit of your personal academic progress, is what we are seeing now because it has become a matter of survival."