Ross: China’s search for a COVID-19 vaccine is good for everyone

The FBI has issued a warning to laboratories doing COVID-19 research: Hackers associated with China have been attempting to steal data on vaccines, treatments, and testing.

The FBI says it’s been going on since the outbreak began, and it could jeopardize the delivery of secure, effective, and efficient treatments.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but if it should turn out that the Chinese hackers were actively sabotaging data to slow down vaccine research, that’s an act of war and we should turn off the lights in Beijing.

But maybe there’s a more benign reason.

“Perhaps most significantly for China for geopolitical value to be able to say they were the first to develop a vaccine,” U.S. Justice Department National Security Division head John Demers said recently.

So China wants to be first. Well, what if they are first? If there’s one lesson from this catastrophe, it’s that an infection anywhere is an infection everywhere. The sooner China gets healthy, the safer we all are.

I understand why we don’t want countries stealing the recipe for Coca Cola, or Facebook’s secret newsfeed algorithm, but when we’re talking about a COVID cure, why shouldn’t every country be sharing what they know voluntarily?

Plus, we have pretty good hackers too, and if China does get close to a cure, I bet we’ll know before they do.

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