Covidvaccine the new diplomatic gambit

AFP – The long-awaited coronavirus vaccine has become the diplomatic battleground between the world’s great powers, with Russia and China leading the way, and Europe and the United States in the background.

“Access to vaccines is the most important challenge facing the international community. Almost like a new ‘arms race’,” according to the US think tank Soufan.

For powers such as China, Russia and India, the prestige card is played in the poorest countries, where they have established themselves as the providers of this rare “global public good.” While the United States and the European Union, submerged in the pandemic, reserve the doses of vaccines for their population.

Beijing, whose image was reinforced at the beginning of the pandemic by having an abundant stock of masks, has not stopped announcing shipments of doses (including donations) to African countries such as Algeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe (200,000 vaccines), as well as to Latin American countries such as Venezuela (500,000) or the Dominican Republic (768,000).”It has been able to impose itself as the great ally of the countries of the South at a time when the North shows signs of an almost congenital selfishness”, affirms Bertrand Badie, professor of International Relations at the School of Political Sciences (Science Po) in Paris. .

Despite being received in Europe with smiles of superiority, the Sputnik V vaccine, recently crowned by a good evaluation of the British medical journal The Lancet, has placed Russia in the Chinese wake.

Three countries of the European Union, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, (located in the Soviet orbit during the Cold War) have opted for the Russian vaccine without waiting for its approval by the European Medicines Agency.

“Showing the world that Russia ultimately suffered less from the coronavirus than the United States and that it is more effective (in vaccines) than Western Europe is a good way to rebuild its power,” estimates Bertrand Badie.

“In international relations, image campaigns are decisive,” Badie told AFP,underlining “Vladimir Putin’s obsession with restoring Russian power.”