Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: China’s vaccine cooperation is crucial in Pakistan’s vaccination drive, and China always comes to help at Pakistan’s time of need, as some Pakistani health officials, scholars as well as ordinary people have observed.
“Whenever Pakistan is in trouble, or there has been some crisis, China has always been forthcoming and helping Pakistan,” said Abdul Rehman Tarar, a retired senior Pakistani military official who has been witnessing the Pakistan-China friendship for decades, with both countries supporting each other and firmly standing by each other.
“In the last one and a half years, people saw support and cooperation from China, though the country itself was seriously threatened by a very rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Tarar, who has also authored a book on China in his native Urdu language, told.
Recently, Tarar has witnessed the Pakistan-China relationship reaching new heights with ordinary Pakistanis benefitting from China’s vaccine donations and supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pakistanis, who were in a dismal situation amid the COVID-19 pandemic, felt the true essence of the Pakistan-China friendship when their close friend China overcame its own difficulties to provide protective gear, ventilators and finally vaccines to help Pakistan fight the pandemic, said Tarar, who is among millions of Pakistanis to be inoculated with Chinese vaccines against COVID-19.
“Throughout the pandemic, when the people of Pakistan switched on the television or visited social media on their phones, they would see aircraft initially carrying protective gear and then loads of vaccines from China to Pakistan,” while other countries in the West such as the United States which were supposed to be working for humanity, as they were bragging themselves to be, were seen looking inward when their own systems got challenged, he said.
Pakistan started its COVID-19 vaccination drive in February this year after receiving vaccines donated by China. With more donations from China as well as the Sinopharm, Sinovac and CanSino COVID-19 vaccines it had purchased from China, Pakistan has been immunizing its population against COVID-19.
