Global Times (6 August 2021) – China on Thursday vowed to make efforts to provide the world with 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines this year and donate $100 million to COVAX to promote global vaccine provision amid the rampaging Delta variant, which is bringing about more challenges for developing countries to access vaccines and combat the pandemic while the West continues to drag its heels in fulfilling its promises.
Chinese President Xi Jinping made the announcement Thursday night in a written address to the first meeting of a forum on international cooperation on COVID-19 vaccines.
Xi said he expects the forum to further boost fair vaccine accessibility worldwide, boost solidarity among developing countries and contribute to the success in the fight against the novel coronavirus.
Developing countries are facing three main challenges: the low accessibility to vaccines, the declining efficacy of existing vaccines against mutations, and the competition between different producers on the international market, making it more difficult for developing countries to choose vaccines, Zha Daojiong, a professor of international political economy in the School of International Studies and Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development at Peking University, told the Global Times on Thursday.
“Cooperation on vaccines is limited not only in providing finished products, but also jointly producing vaccines,” Zha noted. He said that the Thursday conference will promote more cooperation between Chinese and foreign producers, leading to overseas production of China-developed vaccines in order to increase production capacity, and save time and costs for international transportation.
Chinese experts noted that the conference served as an opportunity for developing countries to communicate with each other and come up with solutions to the challenges they are facing in accessing vaccines.
China is able to produce 5 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines per year and only needs half of them to vaccinate its 1.4 billion people. This means China is able to provide the world with a large amount of vaccines, Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based vaccine expert, told the Global Times on Thursday.
The key work in the current stage is to unite the international community and put aside ideological divergences to combat the pandemic to provide the world with vaccines of the highest efficacy, Tao noted.
Key global support
The international community has been working together to ensure accessibility and equity of vaccine distribution in developing countries. However, inequity between rich and poor regions in access to vaccines continues to worsen due to unbalanced resource distribution and the West’s slowness in realizing its promise to assist poor regions.
To date, 82 percent of all COVID-19 vaccine doses that have gone into arms worldwide have been administered in high-income and upper-middle-income countries. By contrast, less than 1 percent have been administered in low-income countries. Meanwhile, COVAX, the multinational vaccine facility, is struggling to meet this challenge, having distributed only 153 million doses out of 4.1 billion administered worldwide, according to data tracked by the Duke University.
While more than half of all Americans have had at least one dose and dozens of rich countries aren’t far behind, less than 1 percent of people across the world’s low-income countries have been vaccinated.
Meanwhile, the African continent’s vaccination rates are still painfully low: Just 16 million, or less than 2 percent, of Africa’s 1.3 billion people are now fully vaccinated, according to AP.
While rich countries are hoping to vaccinate 70 percent of their populations, most developing countries are struggling with the vaccine demand-supply gap – they still lack about billions of shots needed to vaccinate 30 percent of their population by the end of this year, Feng Duojia, president of the China Vaccine Industry Association, told the Global Times on Thursday.
China will become the world’s most important vaccine provider with the largest number and the most selection of products, Feng noted.
In addition to expanding production, Chinese authorities and producers have also been accelerating research and development of vaccines to deal with the rapidly mutating virus as the world is dragged into a third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the rampaging Delta variant, which has been found to be much more infectious than the original variant.