In other lands, the Chinese attempt to buy influence and loyalty via the Covid pandemic may be failing:
A GROWING number of countries that have been depending on vaccines developed in China are losing faith that these alone can rein in the coronavirus as they face continued surges in infections and the spread of the more transmissible delta variant.
On 1 August, Cambodia became the latest nation to approve the use of a different vaccine as a booster shot. It will administer the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine as a third dose to bolster immune protection for those who have already received two doses of the Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines.
In the past month, Bahrain, Indonesia, Thailand, Uruguay and the United Arab Emirates have all begun mixing and matching vaccines in a tactic known as heterologous vaccination in the hope of improving protection and stemming transmission.
Although China’s two leading vaccines have gained emergency approval from the World Health Organization, not much phase III trial data has been made public for either. The jabs from Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech both use inactivated virus particles to provoke an immune response. This is a more traditional approach than the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccines, but has yielded worse results. [“Countries are mixing and matching vaccines to tackle the delta variant,” NewScientist, (7 August 2021, paywall)]
This is an important consequence for the autocrats of China. They’ve been attempting to sell autocracy as a better way of governing; by doing so, they would earn credibility and influence convertible to prestige and wealth.
Falling down on their promises gets them little to nothing. And while no one is likely to challenge them militarily, it does make the leadership look bad, a valuable consideration in face-conscious China.
Their lack of greater influence may be one of the most important, yet invisible, results of the pandemic.
