Geopolitics of vaccines: the soft power behind the vaccination race

If there is anything we can confirm after a year of pandemic, it is that humanity does not exist as a unified entity: there are countries and companies which compete with each other, which measure themselves, which make sparks and which – sometimes – support each other. At first, when COVID-19 was new, many of us waited for “the” vaccine, an antidote as general and unified as the virus itself. However, a general problem is solved by a calculated move in which each player tries to get into a good position.

American professor and theorist Joseph Nye talks about sweet power to denote the “soft” mode by which a state or an international entity manages to exert influence, as opposed to the “hard” mode, that is, economic force or sanctions. Analyzed from this angle, the country that became the first to introduce the vaccine, in addition to vaccinating its population and reactivating its economy as quickly as possible, could influence other states. This week, on our YouTube channel, we analyze behind the scenes of a candidacy which, more than health, is geopolitical.

THE LIGHTS OF CHINA

The fact that the virus has spread from China has produced a state of confrontation in former United States President Donald Trump: after all, the virus came from China. The scandals led by the WHO for withholding information at the request of China, according to the German weekly The mirror, on COVID-19, prompted Donald Trump to withdraw funds from the global body and, above all, they reduced the credibility of the scientific community. At the same time, it is undeniable that China – on several occasions – has not been entirely clear with the information provided, and there are those who suspect that the number of deaths in Wuhan, the city of origin of COVID-19, is at least ten times higher than that indicated by official statistics. However, the problem is not suspicion, which may well be wrong in a world where fake news and conspiracy theories run faster than real news, but there’s no way to verify it.

Today, the Asian giant has three vaccines: those from Sinopharm, Coronavac and CanSino Biologics, which, compared to others, are cheap. This is important because, although at the start of the pandemic, China played the card of providing masks to the main European capitals to show itself as a key player on the world stage (the so-called “mask diplomacy”), it There are indications that now it is pursuing the same strategy by distributing inexpensive vaccines in third world countries. In other words, vaccine diplomacy.

Xi Jinping’s regime responded with slurs against Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, claiming that the Western media had not given importance to the deaths in Norway and Germany: “It cannot be independently verified, but it is is worrying: 10 deaths in Germany shortly after receiving the vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech, ”tweeted one of the spokesman for the Beijing Foreign Ministry, Xhao Lijian.

THE RED SATELLITE

Another big country that has decided not to be part of the Western science circuit is Russia, the first to officially announce a COVID-19 vaccine. The name chosen for the vaccine is no accident: it refers to the victories of the last century, when the USSR, a scientific power, put the Sputnik I satellite into orbit in 1957. To verify it, just look at the video that was shown in the press conference: a planet Earth is invaded by a virus and a satellite, Sputnik, goes out into space and manages to disinfect the entire surface.

Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil were among the few countries that initially purchased doses of Sputnik. Many read it as a political gesture, a way of dealing with the “rift” – Venezuela, of course, did – but the truth is that in the face of the European Union’s hoarding of vaccines from Pfizer and from Oxford-AstraZeneca, they bought what they could.

VACCINE IN LATIN AMERICA: TWO ALTERNATIVES

Faced with the problem of inequalities, two possibilities arise. One is, as mentioned above, China. The Asian giant has three laboratories working simultaneously, Sinopharm, CanSino and Sinovac, with which it ensures that it will make the vaccine a “global public good”. In this way, China is already supplying Brazil, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates, and there are already agreements with Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Turkey. Some African countries are also entering into agreements, such as Botswana, Morocco or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The other is Covax, a global project promoted by WHO that offers a vaccine bank to supply poor countries. The idea is that all countries can immunize at least 20 percent of their population with vaccines from all laboratories. Although the project was not very well received at the beginning, it promised, in early March, two million vaccines for Argentina.

To fully understand all the implications of the topic, watch the video on our YouTube channel.

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