Vaccine Diplomacy in Latin America, Caribbean a PR Coup for China.

• Author: Ellis, R. Evan
• Position: Viewpoint

* The COVID-19 pandemic has created multiple opportunities for the People's Republic of China to advance its commercial position and influence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The most significant, in the short term, has been China's vaccine diplomacy. Over a million people in the region have died from COVID-19 since the virus was first detected in the region in February 2020. That death count, according to the Pan American Health Organization, is about 75 percent more than in the United States, which has registered a similar number of infections.

Moreover, while the United States has inoculated over 62 percent of its adult population, bringing infection rates dramatically down and allowing it to begin to reopen its economy, the end of the struggle is nowhere in sight for Latin America, where variants of the virus are driving new waves of infection and forcing new economic shutdowns in countries from Colombia to Trinidad and Tobago.

In the context of the region's urgent need for vaccines to combat the pandemic, a perfect storm of unintended effects from U.S. policy decisions, the dynamics of international vaccine contracts and prioritization, and China pursuing strategic and business opportunities, has given rise to a widespread and dangerous--albeit erroneous--perception that Beijing is coming to the rescue of the region with its vaccines while America focuses exclusively on its own population.

From the beginning of the vaccine rollout, the United States pursued a strategy of attending to the needs of its own population through direct vaccine contracts with major pharmaceutical manufacturers, while simultaneously contributing generously to the World Health Organization's COVAX initiative to help other nations obtain the vaccine they needed. COVAX, by design, deliberately deemphasizes the identity of donors and focuses on equitable distribution of vaccines of demonstrated quality.

The $4 billion U.S. commitment to COVAX is far greater than that of any other international donor or group, including the European Union and the United Kingdom, with neither China nor Russia even making the list.

Unfortunately, the massive, urgent demand for vaccines, logistics difficulties, and--ironically--the need by

Western pharmaceutical firms to prioritize contracts they had with the U.S. government, has to date limited the number of vaccines reaching the region through the COVAX effort. At the same time, the nature of COVAX suppressed the region's...