This isn't about countries. I think it is unethical to hide research when it could save lives. If country B is hiding research, that doesn't mean country A should hide it as a revenge, and that doesn't mean the residents of country B deserve to take the brunt of the actions of their government policies. The civilians of B and the civilians of A deserve the best of science equally.
The virus doesn't care about where country borders are drawn. Even in the above situation where country B is hiding their research, if country A shares their research with B, it helps country A themselves because country B's people may be inoculated much faster and immigrants from country B to A will not be carrying the virus anymore.
The objective function that should be optimized is getting the virus eradicated from the world ASAP. There's a good chance that only some fraction of the world needs to be inoculated with a vaccine before the virus is nearly eradicated, and that will only happen if the vaccine is shared across borders. A good start, for example, would be to inoculate everyone who wants to take a flight or train, inoculate all doctors, and inoculate all service industry personnel, regardless of which of the 200 countries they are a citizen of.
Why are you assuming the US is hiding research?
Are you aware that there are protocols in medical research against premature release of information as it will taint the results (placebo effects etc)?
There are blackout periods etc. just to make sure that the analysis is valid and not tainted.
Also a lot of research has lag time. Experiments can take a lot of time.
You are also assuming that China is hacking to release information for the greater good. You are discounting the following:
1) Hacking to corrupt results and data.
2) Hacking to patent possible cures first.
3) Getting to a cure first to use as leverage over countries. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/politics/coronavirus-c...
This is an interesting potential debate. In some sense we are sacrificing lives for scientific validity, because it is potentially possible that we could deploy early, ignore blackouts, and have probabilistically fewer deaths + tainted data. But the world is apparently wanting to choose probabilistically more deaths + clean data.
This is spurious logic.
How are you saying that tainted science + bad data will result in fewer deaths long term?
You may end up with probabilistically more deaths + tainted data.
Why is that not a possibility?
Secondly, patent where? If they do it to limit the use I doubt many nations would respect that patent.
With #3 you are just arguing for a form of debt slavery.
Thanks for conveniently ignoring #1.
FBI stance is we can hide stuff from you, and hack you, because we are the "good guys".
An American journalist toured the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Everyone he spoke to proudly bragged about the USSR and its accomplishments. But some things seemed off. He asked about the mass starvation, and his handler explained it was because the kulaks destroyed their food to spite the people. He questioned why newspapers would one day say one thing, and the next denounce the same as counterrevolutionary. His handler responded, there was no difference, he's just misunderstanding the context. Finally he asked about political opponents mysteriously disappearing when they stood against Stalin.
Exasperated, the handler shrieked, "And you are lynching negroes!"
Is it fair and ethical to ask country A to make free all research while being okay with country B hiding its own research on the same subject?
Let us not whitewash unethical behavior with broad strokes of "freely available to all as a matter of principle."