My Take | The West’s ‘sicken thy neighbour’ fight over vaccine access

If China and Russia provide inoculation aid to developing countries, it’s called vaccine diplomacy. If Western countries do it, it’s humanitarianism. Fine, you say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to. Except Western countries aren’t conducting much humanitarian aid, rather the opposite.

These range from hoarding surplus vaccines, blocking shipments to other countries and orders from them, and stymieing countries such as India and Africa to bypass intellectual property regimes to develop Covid diagnostic kits and cheap vaccines.

It’s hardly surprising that European Council President Charles Michel complains: “We should not let ourselves be misled by China and Russia, both regimes with less desirable values than ours, as they organise highly limited but widely publicised operations to supply vaccines to others.”

No one thinks China or Russia is doing it out of pure goodness; does any country ever? But what they have done has exposed Western inadequacy, malfeasance and hypocrisy.

The American government has ordered another 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that will gain an unseemly US surplus of doses while the rest of the world is struggling with serious shortages; in the case of large swathes of Africa, almost complete unavailability.