By Zhou Xiaoming
With China poised to roll out its long-awaited COVID-19 vaccines, we can expect a barrage of criticism and skepticism from some Western media outlets. Most of the Western media outlets have been portraying China’s efforts to develop vaccines as a “great power competition” with the United States.
In fact, they have called China’s move to supply vaccines to other countries as “vaccine diplomacy”-an instrument of diplomacy intended to repair China’s “damaged reputation” resulting from an alleged mishandling of the early stages of the pandemic and to gain future political and economic leverage.
Further, they question the efficacy of Chinese-made vaccines, arguing that quality may have been compromised in a rush to give the green light to domestic vaccine candidates under internal and external pressure.
Vaccine development not a race among nations
As Chinese leaders see it, the development of vaccines is, first and foremost, about protecting human health and saving lives globally. Vaccine developers have a huge commercial stake in being the first to cross the finish line. The first companies that successfully develop and produce vaccines and indeed their country of registration stand to gain enormous commercial advantages.
However, the health of people in the global village is far more important than profits. Thus, vaccine development is not a race between the US and China. Rather, it is a race against time, against a common enemy of humankind.
Early development and delivery of an effective vaccine, regardless of the country where it is developed, represents a victory not just for a particular company or country but for the human race as a whole. Chinese leaders are convinced that in the fight against COVID-19, governments and people around the world need to come together to support and help each other.
Strengthening the global fight against COVID-19
It was in keeping with this spirit that as soon as the genome sequencing of the novel coronavirus was completed in early January, China provided it to the rest of the world for free unlike the case of HIV/AIDS in 1983, which ignited an acrimonious, protracted patent battle between a French scientist and an American scientist.
The prompt release of the data greatly helped researchers both within and outside China to develop vaccines. More important, Chinese leaders have repeatedly vowed to treat China’s vaccines as global public goods to be shared with people in other parts of the world, especially the needy and disadvantaged. China is now set to follow through its commitment by sending hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines to other countries in the next couple of months.
China has also announced to donate $2 billion over two years to help the developing countries cope with the impact of the pandemic. In addition, it has joined Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, an effort led by the World Health Organization to ensure that safe and effective vaccines quickly reach rich and poor countries alike.
And yet, all the goodwill of China and its contribution to the global fight against the pandemic is often lost on most of the Western media outlets, as they are largely blinded by their tendency to view China through the geopolitical lens, particularly when the subject relates to the West.
There is also a suspicion that disparaging China’s vaccine development and generosity is a ploy to conceal the indifference of the West toward poor countries by diverting the world’s attention from its vaccine hoarding.
For months now, many Western economies have been engaged in an intense and expensive competition to produce effective vaccines, which has largely put these sophisticated pharmaceuticals beyond the reach of poor countries. Media reports say the US, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Japan have placed orders for 3.1 billion doses of vaccines from AstraZeneca/Oxford, Moderna, Sanofi/GSK, Curevax, Johnson& Johnson, Valneva and Novavax.
–The Daily Mail-China Daily News Exchange Item
