The unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines has left 80 percent of global vaccine stocks in the hands of just 10 countries.
This situation was exacerbated by the administration of former US president Donald Trump, which last year attempted to withdraw from the WHO.
This opened a political vacuum that China immediately filled, allowing Beijing to engage in “vaccine diplomacy,” enhance its soft power and promote Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) vision of a Chinese “community of shared human destiny.”
Beijing used its vaccine diplomacy to project China as an ethical force for good, as opposed to “selfish” Western nations, which stockpiled vaccines for themselves. The Chinese Communist Party sought to build a narrative that China was working to provide every country access to COVID-19 vaccines, as a public commodity.
Using this message, Beijing was able to shift attention toward production capacity and distribution, and away from the efficacy of the vaccines in inoculating people against the disease.
Is China really more benevolent than Western nations?
According to US research, China only donated a small quantity of vaccines to specific markets or nations for trial purposes. Most Chinese vaccines were sold, not donated, to foreign nations.
A research paper published by Springer Nature titled “Vaccine diplomacy: nation branding and China’s COVID-19 soft power play” shows that of the 656 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine Chinese pharmaceutical companies exported to foreign nations at the time of the study, only 8.6 million, or 1.31 percent, were donated; the rest were sold.
Moreover, most sales have been concentrated in Latin American, Southeast Asian and African nations. Since most of these countries lack robust cold chain storage technology, China’s inactivated virus vaccines were more attractive than Western messenger ribonucleic acid — known as mRNA — vaccines, since inactivated virus vaccines are easier to store, requiring only conventional refrigeration.
Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine retails for US$13.60 per shot, while the most expensive of China’s COVID-19 vaccines sell for US$60 per shot. Compared with US$4 per shot for the AstraZeneca vaccine, China’s offerings are considerably more expensive.
For simplicity, if China sold the CoronaVac vaccine at US$13.60 per shot, it made US$8.8 billion from export sales through this one vaccine.
While other countries have donated vaccines to the COVAX scheme, China has sold its vaccines to the program. Beijing has also provided economically weak nations with loans to purchase its vaccines, using every available opportunity to make money from the crisis.
China is quietly lining its pockets, yet has the temerity to criticize Western nations and cast itself as the savior of the world.
Yang Chun-chieh is a graduate student at National Tsing-Hua University’s Institute of Sociology.
Translated by Edward Jones
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