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Workers unload boxes containing the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine, donated by China, at Damascus International Airport on April 24, 2021, in the Syrian capital.
Loay Bishara | AFP | Getty Images
The competition between the United States and China may rage on another front: Covid-19 vaccine diplomacy.
China has been a major supplier of Covid vaccines to much of the developing world, an effort that some experts said could boost Beijing’s global influence and deepen its relations with other countries.
But a health and policy expert told CNBC Thursday that the United States is catching up now that the White House has drawn up plans to donate millions of doses of the Covid vaccine abroad, and President Joe Biden appears set to do more.
“We’ll see that China has a much fiercer competitor,” Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNBC’s Squawk Boxes Asia.
Huang, who is also a professor in Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations, said that in the past few months, China has been “almost the only major player” sending Covid vaccines to other countries.
This is particularly the case when India has halted vaccine exports to prioritize its domestic needs and the Russian supply abroad is still very limited, he explained.
Several reports have indicated the United States is intensifying its efforts to spread Covid vaccines globally.
Biden is said to be set to announce in a speech at the Group of Seven summit on Thursday that the United States will purchase an additional 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to share with COVAX, a global vaccine-sharing initiative.
CNBC also reported Wednesday that the administration is negotiating with Moderna to secure additional vaccine doses to supply the world.
Publicly available clinical trial data to date shows that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots have higher efficacy rates – more than 90% – in preventing Covid infections than those developed by Chinese companies.
Questions have been raised about the efficacy of Chinese vaccines, with countries such as Bahrain and Chile reporting an increase in cases despite vaccinating their populations faster than many countries.
The World Health Organization said earlier this month that studies showed that a vaccine by Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech prevented symptoms in 51% of those vaccinated and prevented severe Covid-19 and hospitalization in 100% of the population studied.
The origins of Covid-19
Relations between the United States and China were off to a rough start under the Biden administration. The two sides have clashed over several issues, including the origin of the coronavirus, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Biden said last month that he had ordered a close intelligence review of the origins of the pandemic, including whether the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory. In response, China accused the United States of a political “blame game”.
Huang said the issue of the origins of Covid-19 has become so politicized that it is likely to further inflame tensions between the United States and China if additional evidence emerges to support the possibility that Covid-19 originated from a lab accident.
Without China’s cooperation, Huang said, such “inflamed” evidence may not be found. However, in the West, the theory that the virus came from a lab has become an “increasingly credible, if not prevalent, explanation” for the origin of the epidemic, he said.
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