How is it possible that the two rivals cooperated in the 1950s and hesitate to deal with each other today? We have three assumptions that might help to understand the lack of cooperation.
1. There might be a death threshold that encourages to cooperate ignoring political antagonisms. One can assume that certain circumstances, such as extreme death rates, can devalue political obstacles to cooperation. Both polio and smallpox pandemics were more contagious then COVID. If those pandemics truly spread globally, they would take hundreds of millions of lives. In addition, they were primarily dangerous to children, which also influenced political imagination. Although so far COVID takes more lives than polio and smallpox annually, lower mortality rates might keep "the plague alarm" off, allowing politicians to play their own games.
Polio: 5,5% death rate/25% paralysis
Smallpox: 30% death rate
COVID-19: 2,1% death rate
2. Institutional links in the 1950s might have been stronger than in the 2020s. After WWII, the US and USSR had rather developed institutions of communication at ministerial level. The post-war political debacle did not vanish all institutional links. Moreover, in the late 1950s two countries concluded a cultural and scientific exchange agreement, which spurred cooperation on other levels. Although in the 1990s – 2010s the US and Russia had created many institutional links, such as the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission,they all have collapsed after 2014.
3. In the 1950s, there were two major players - American and Soviet states. The was no such thing as "global pharma" yet. In the 2020s, global pharmaceutical companies became the third actor in healthcare cooperation. While there are many cases of successful international cooperation initiated by global pharma, pharmaceutical corporations are the major obstacle to releasing patents on COVID vaccines and making research available to others.
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