Further to my post on Tuesday, when I said people should take the first approved COVID-19 vaccine available instead of holding out for a “better” one, I mused on Twitter about whether that extends to Russia’s Sputnik V or some of the Chinese vaccines available in other countries.
Tablet’s Armin Rosen is a definitive “no,” but I’m at the point where I’d probably take a chance on the Russian vaccine if it were available to me. There is some evidence that it is indeed effective against COVID-19.
Chinese vaccines? Eh, until we see some credible data, I’d have to think long and hard about that one.
But many developing countries, and even some states in Europe, have decided to go for it, and China is happy to oblige.
China’s vaccine diplomacy campaign has been a surprising success: It has pledged roughly half a billion doses of its vaccines to more than 45 countries, according to a country-by-country tally by The Associated Press. With just four of China’s many vaccine makers claiming they are able to produce at least 2.6 billion doses this year, a large part of the world’s population will end up inoculated not with the fancy Western vaccines boasting headline-grabbing efficacy rates, but with China’s humble, traditionally made shots.
Amid a dearth of public data on China’s vaccines, hesitations over their efficacy and safety are still pervasive in the countries depending on them, along with concerns about what China might want in return for deliveries. Nonetheless, inoculations with Chinese vaccines already have begun in more than 25 countries, and the Chinese shots have been delivered to another 11, according to the AP tally, based on independent reporting in those countries along with government and company announcements.
It’s a potential face-saving coup for China, which has been determined to transform itself from an object of mistrust over its initial mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak to a savior. Like India and Russia, China is trying to build goodwill, and has pledged roughly 10 times more vaccines abroad than it has distributed at home.
“We’re seeing certainly real-time vaccine diplomacy start to play out, with China in the lead in terms of being able to manufacture vaccines within China and make them available to others,” said Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center at Duke University. “Some of them donated, some of them sold, and some of them sold with debt financing associated with it.”
China has said it is supplying “vaccine aid” to 53 countries and exports to 27, but it rejected a request by the AP for the list. Beijing has also denied vaccine diplomacy, and a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said China considered the vaccine a “global public good.” Chinese experts reject any connection between the export of its vaccines and the revamping of its image.
While Western countries fight among themselves about vaccine distribution, China is scoring a huge propaganda win by shipping its wares to countries that desperately need it.
Of course there may be strings attached:
There are concerns among receiving countries that China’s vaccine diplomacy may come at a cost, which China has denied. In the Philippines, where Beijing is donating 600,000 vaccines, a senior diplomat said China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, gave a subtle message to tone down public criticism of growing Chinese assertiveness in the disputed South China Sea.
The senior diplomat said Wang did not ask for anything in exchange for vaccines, but it was clear he wanted “friendly exchanges in public, like control your megaphone diplomacy a little.” The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue publicly.
More importantly, there’s still a real question about whether some of these vaccines are actually any good:
Sinopharm, which said its vaccine was 79% effective based on interim data from clinical trials, did not respond to requests for an interview. Sinopharm’s chairman has said they have not had a single severe adverse event in response to their vaccine.
Chinese vaccine companies have been “slow and spotty” in releasing their trial data, compared to companies like Pfizer and Moderna, said Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at the U.S. think tank Council for Foreign Relations. None of China’s three vaccine candidates used globally have publicly released their late-stage clinical trial data. CanSino, another Chinese company with a one-shot vaccine that it says is 65% effective, declined to be interviewed.
China’s pharmaceutical business practices also have raised concerns. In 2018, it emerged that one of China’s biggest vaccine companies falsified data to sell its rabies vaccines. That same year, news broke that a Sinopharm subsidiary, which is behind one of the COVID-19 vaccines now, had made substandard diphtheria vaccines used in mandatory immunizations.
[…]
A December YouGov poll of 19,000 people in 17 countries and regions on how they felt about different vaccines found that China’s received the second-lowest score, tied with India’s. In the Philippines, which has ordered 25 million Sinovac doses, less than 20% of those surveyed by a research group expressed confidence in China’s vaccines.
Those concerns have been exacerbated by confusion around the efficacy of Sinovac’s shot. In Turkey, where Sinovac conducted part of its efficacy trials, officials have said the vaccine was 91% effective. However, in Brazil, officials revised the efficacy rate in late-stage clinical trials from 78% to just over 50% after including mild infections.
A senior Chinese official said Brazil’s numbers were lower because its volunteers were healthcare workers who faced a higher risk of infection. But other medical experts have said exposure would not affect a vaccine’s effectiveness.
Sinovac’s trials were conducted separately in Turkey and Brazil, and the differences in efficacy rates arise from differences in the populations, a spokesman for the company said in a previous interview with the AP. The company declined to be interviewed for this article. An expert panel in Hong Kong assessed the efficacy of the vaccine at about 51%, and the city approved its use in mid-February.
Globally, public health officials have said any vaccine that is at least 50% effective is useful. International scientists are anxious to see results from final-stage testing published in a peer-reviewed science journal for all three Chinese companies.
It’s also unclear how the Chinese shots work against new strains of the virus that are emerging, especially a variant first identified in South Africa. For example, Sinopharm has pledged 800,000 shots to South Africa’s neighbor, Zimbabwe.
Being a dictatorship has its advantages: if you want to make a great show of force to wow the world - whether it’s beating the Americans into space or vaccinating the world against COVID-19 - you can throw all of your country’s resources into doing so, without having to worry about your people asking inconvenient questions about it. If you’re a budding authoritarian or a New York Times columnist (but I repeat myself) it’s easy to be dazzled by how far China has come.
The flip side is that when you don’t allow dissent at home, no one else will take you unconditionally at your word. Big American and European pharmaceutical companies aren’t that much more popular than the Chinese Communist Party, but outside of the lunatic anti-vaxxer fringe, no one doubts that products by Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson work as intended. It may be many years before Chinese and Russian vaccines find wide acceptance.
Ironically, it’s the Russians who may have gotten an effective vaccine out before anyone else - a vaccine they named after their pioneering space program, no less. But even their own people aren’t sure if they trust it. There’s a lesson there.
This is a pretty depressing time to be a liberal democrat, though:
For the 15th consecutive year, democratic freedoms declined around the globe in 2020, worsening from Asia to Europe to North America, and affecting nearly three in four people across the planet. In India, a pattern of repression by Prime Minister Narendra Modi saw the world’s largest democracy downgraded from “free” to “partly free.” Elsewhere, regimes exploited Covid-19 to undermine opposition and threaten free discourse, while democracy movements suffered brutal crackdowns, from Venezuela to Guinea to Algeria.
“The long democratic recession is deepening,” the independent watchdog Freedom House said in an annual report, which evaluates 195 countries and 15 territories, citing 25 indicators of political rights and civil liberties to assign the status of “free,” “partly free,” or “not free.” The rise of authoritarianism last year, Freedom House said, was part of “a new global status quo in which acts of repression went unpunished and democracy’s advocates were increasingly isolated.”
India, which has suffered a steady decline in freedom since 2014 under Modi, saw its status tip to “partly free” because of intensified crackdowns on protests and free speech and the further decline of judicial independence since his re-election in 2019. “The fall of India from the upper ranks of free nations could have a particularly damaging impact on global democratic standards,” the report said. “Under Modi, India appears to have abandoned its potential to serve as a global democratic leader, elevating narrow Hindu nationalist interests at the expense of its founding values.”
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated matters in various countries, providing an excuse for governments across the democratic spectrum to install excessive surveillance, restrictions on freedom of movement and assembly, and arbitrary and violent enforcement of those restrictions. False and misleading information on the pandemic—sometimes generated deliberately by political leaders—jeopardized lives. Dictators from Venezuela to Cambodia exploited the crisis to suppress opposition and fortify their power.
[…]
The United States and China were net exporters of anti-democratic thought and action in 2020, Freedom House said, through the two nations’ domestic handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, their high-handed dealings with international bodies and, in China’s case, the renewed anti-democracy crackdown on Hong Kong.
The report also lamented the “eclipse of U.S. leadership” during the Trump presidency—not just the attempt to overturn the 2020 election (“arguably the most destructive act of his time in office”), but also the previous four years of “condoning and indeed pardoning official malfeasance, ducking accountability for his own transgressions, and encouraging racist and right-wing extremists.” While noting that many U.S. institutions held up, Freedom House warned that “it may take years to appreciate and address the effects of the experience on Americans’ ability to come together and collectively uphold a set of civic values.”
“The United States and China were net exporters of anti-democratic thought” might just be the most dispiriting sentence I’ve ever read. However, when one of America’s two major political parties has gone all-in on authoritarianism, and extreme right-wingers in other Western countries adopt their rhetoric, it’s hard to argue the point.
As Glenn Greenwald loves to point out, the United States has long been extremely hypocritical about publicly promoting freedom while coddling and even installing friendly dictatorships. I know how the world really works. But I still prefer an American President who at least talks a good game, and loudly promotes democracy in some countries, over one who says the United States has no right to judge anyone else.
When Trump was running for president in 2016, he was asked about civil liberties in Turkey. The strongman, Erdogan, had cracked down on the country viciously. “I think right now, when it comes to civil liberties,” said Trump, “our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country.”
Trump continued, “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”
In pre-Trump days, conservative Republicans referred to this as “moral equivalence” (and didn’t like it at all).
“I’m a big fan of the president,” said Trump in November 2019. He was talking about Erdogan. And he said to Erdogan, directly, “You’re doing a fantastic job for the people of Turkey.”
[…]
In the summer of 2019, Hong Kong people were massing in the streets, protesting for their rights. A reporter asked Trump, “Are you concerned by reports that the Chinese army may be preparing to intervene in Hong Kong against the demonstrators?” Trump answered,
“Well, something is probably happening with Hong Kong, because, when you look at, you know, what’s going on, they’ve had riots for a long period of time. And I don’t know what China’s attitude is. Somebody said that at some point they’re going to want to stop that. But that’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China. They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”
The American president used the word “riots,” about the Hong Kong demonstrations. This was a blow to the demonstrators, in that “riots” is exactly the word that the Communist Party uses, and rioting is a very serious charge in Hong Kong: carrying a sentence of up to ten years.
President Trump didn’t start the retreat of democracy, but he definitely accelerated it.
America’s Sweetheart, Keith Olbermann, is sending some mixed messages here.
A belligerent crank who’s been fired from every media outlet that ever employed him (remember Current TV? Neither does anyone else) isn’t as big a threat to democracy as, say, storming the Capitol Building to overturn election results. But blue-checks tweeting that people who vote the wrong way deserve to die sure isn’t helping.
Being a callous asshole, it turns out, is almost as contagious as COVID-19. Among George W. Bush-era lefty icons, anyway.
I’ll say this much: at least you never see any noteworthy Republicans mocking blue states and saying they had it coming whenever disaster strikes…oh, right.