DM Monitoring
WASHINGTON: China’s pledge and action to make its COVID-19 vaccine a global public good will help strengthen “the weakest link” in the world’s battle against the pandemic, a renowned U.S. expert has said.
“I think China’s doing about it the right way,” Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies, told recently, when talking about China’s dispatching vaccines to countries in dire need.
“If the weakest link is in some faraway country wherever the COVID-19 is still … prevalent, we will all have … mutations of COVID-19 which will defeat the vaccines already exist,” he said.
As vaccine researchers are working around the clock to offer stronger and broader protection against COVID-19, preliminary data from a study in Brazil indicates that a type of vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech is effective against the P1 variant first detected in Brazil, Sao Paulo State Governor Joao Doria confirmed to Reuters on Wednesday.
Gupta expressed the hope that China will continue proceeding forward with distributing vaccines “as widely as possible in the developing world” under the World Health Organization’s COVAX framework.
As a steadfast advocate for equitable vaccine distribution, China has joined COVAX, under which China has undertaken to provide an initial 10 million doses of domestic vaccine for emergency use in developing countries.
China has also donated vaccines to peacekeepers from various countries and is ready to work with the International Olympic Committee to provide vaccines to Olympians, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi told a press conference on Sunday.
So far, China has donated or is donating COVID-19 vaccines to 69 developing countries in urgent need, and is exporting vaccines to 43 countries, Wang said, noting that China has worked in real earnest to improve vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.
