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Vaccines shaping a new world order
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- The story: The pandemic has vastly worsened the global north-south divide, with wealthy Western states moving steadily toward herd immunity while a majority of Africa, Asia, and Latin America wait for vaccines to trickle down. Only a small number of countries produce their own coronavirus vaccines, but the rest of the world depends on them for their immunizations.
- A new world order: This raises the specter of a new geopolitical arrangement—one in which patron-client relationships are determined by the asymmetry in vaccine supply versus demand. There are indications that "vaccine have-nots" are vulnerable to diplomatic coercion and enticement. Russia and China have begun supplying vaccines in exchange for favorable foreign-policy concessions, as has Israel. Western countries, meanwhile, are focused on their own domestic vaccination programs—although the United States has recently declared its intention to offer vaccine aid to hard-hit countries, especially India.
- Market solution: For the non-vaccine producers, there’s always the market. The European Union has begun to round the corner, administering millions of doses among its 27 member states. Israel continues to be an early success story; rather than employing its own considerable pharmaceutical base, it has imported millions of Pfizer-BioNTech doses and administered them rapidly and efficiently. With no domestic production capacity, Canada is now third in the league of vaccination rates for the top 34 largest countries, behind the United Kingdom and the United States. Its tens of millions of doses have all been imported from Europe and the United States. Similar success stories can be found in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.
- What about the others: Rates of vaccinations in most other countries continue to be very low, and notwithstanding the U.S. pile of AstraZeneca doses, this is a result of supply limits. Intellectual property laws and infrastructure constraints mean a near-total monopolization of production capacities in a small handful of countries and a hierarchy of trade advantages and preferences in which a handful of non-producing countries receive priority while others are left wanting.
- What COVAX did: To overcome these challenges, the World Health Organization set up COVAX, an initiative to coordinate vaccine research and license production in order to guarantee fair and equitable distribution worldwide. These efforts have fallen desperately short. Few vaccines have been distributed through this collaborative effort. Instead, facing domestic shortages, the EU and the United States have imposed restrictions on vaccine exports, limiting supply.
- The linking: China and Russia have both actively engaged in vaccine diplomacy, linking vaccine exports to policy concessions and favourable geopolitical outcomes. Russia recently brokered the release of an Israeli citizen held in Syria in exchange for Israel financing Sputnik V vaccines to be sent to Syria. Russia has supplied vaccines to Central and Eastern European countries, drawing them closer to its orbit. China declared that its Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are a “global public good” and has begun supplying them to nearly 100 countries, in many cases at no cost. If this is a seize-the-moment, one-time thing, then Russia and China will likely come out ahead. India, too, once it has confronted the rapidly escalating second wave.
- Annual needs: If boosters or regular vaccinations are not needed more than once every several years, then the world is unlikely to see a significant geopolitical reorientation. But if a yearly shot is needed, as leading epidemiologists have warned may be necessary, it could be another story.
- Building hegemony: One of the main hegemonic goods that aspiring powers provide is national security. Geopolitical dependencies have typically manifested from the provision of military instruments through arms deals, bases, and collective security commitments. During the Cold War, vast quantities of weapons, training, and troops flowed into the global south as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for client states and as those client states opportunistically sought the most generous patron. In the global pharmaceutical market, the United States faces stiff competition from several potential rivals. In Western Europe, Germany and the U.K. enjoy disproportionate influence, as does Russia in its former spheres of influence, Central and Eastern Europe. China and India both have massive production capacity and, most importantly, dominate export markets for generics outside the West.
- Summary: The global north has begun to crawl out of the crisis with the machinery needed to provide boosters as necessary—while the global south continues to battle an increasingly ferocious plague.
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