G7 bee: generous as they sound, the West's belated vaccine pledges give China the lead

This is an extended version of an article published in today's La Stampa, as well as on the website of the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy

Following the promises made by the G7 countries at their summit in Cornwall to donate one billion COVID vaccines to poor countries, we now know the big pandemic news of 2022. This is that the world will have been vaccinated far sooner than most now expect, chiefly thanks to Chinese donations and sales of vaccines, with some belated but welcome help from the West. Well done, China.

Is that too grudging? This is not a contest, of course: we all share an interest in getting the world vaccinated as soon as possible, for by doing so we will reduce the danger of new mutations of the virus emerging that are resistant to the vaccines and we will all be able to resume our normal lives more quickly. China and the West can and should both contribute to this. That is why the promise by President Joe Biden to donate 500 million vaccine doses during this year and next is truly welcome, as are the pledges by other western leaders to bring the number up to one billion. 

Yet before congratulating ourselves in the G7 countries (the United States, Britain, Canada, Italy, France, Germany and Japan) for our supposed vision and generosity we need to put this pledge into context. During May, the great news for global vaccination efforts was that monthly production nearly doubled, from 420 million doses in April to 822 million in May. More than half of that total, 454 million doses, was produced by two Chinese companies, Sinovac and Sinopharm, which trebled their production.

Output in the European Union also rose strongly, doubling to 164 million doses, and that in the United States grew too, by about 40%, to 71 million. India’s monthly output, chiefly of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, slipped back. Thus, although the main western vaccines have shown higher efficacy than the Chinese ones, they are not leading the way. China is the world’s leading COVID vaccine producer.

Until now, Chinese donations and sales have been just as modest as have the western ones as China wants to vaccinate its own people first. That is what it is currently doing, at about 17-20 million doses every day, more than half of the 34-36 million being administered daily around the world. Pretty soon, at its present rate of 600 million doses per month, most of China’s 1.4 billion population will have been vaccinated. Taking just the adults, this is likely to be completed in August or September. 

Meanwhile Sinovac and Sinopharm will continue to increase their production. By September, at least half a billion Chinese doses will be available — what the West for some reason calls “surplus” — every month for donation and sale to the rest of the world. Therefore, we can place President Biden’s generous offer of 200 million Pfizer/BioNTech doses this year and 300 million next year, and Boris Johnson’s offer of 100 million sometime in the next 12 months (while also cutting the UK’s overseas aid budget), in their proper context. By mid-Autumn, these welcome offers will nevertheless be equivalent to barely one month’s surplus Chinese production.

That is great for the world, but ought to be less cheering if the goal of the G7 pledges is one of re-establishing western leadership or even prominent standing in the international order. Admittedly, we don’t yet know how generous China will actually be with its vaccine doses or whether it will simply seek to profit from this as a market opportunity. The West has been far more generous than China in contributing funds to the global COVAX initiative to buy vaccines for poorer countries, so perhaps western money will now end up simply buying Chinese vaccines. But, one way or the other, the opportunity is there for China to win more friends and boost its reputation.

There are going to be other challenges ahead caused by the pandemic which will require the West to step up, in the hope that China will do so too, most notably as and when a likely debt restructuring becomes necessary for countries with fragile public finances in Africa and South America. This vaccine precedent, however, suggests that the West remains a follower of events rather than truly the leader it likes to think of itself as.

Let us not end up too negative, however. Thanks to abundant Chinese vaccines, assisted by the G7’s pledged donations, the chances now are that the world could achieve vaccination of the 80% of adults believed necessary for herd immunity by the middle of 2022 at the latest, and probably sooner. 

Just maintaining, not even improving upon, the current daily vaccination rate of 17-20 million doses in China and 16-18 million elsewhere would get the world to that target, according to the Global Commission for Post-Pandemic Policy’s vaccine countdown, between January and July 2022. Now that vaccine supplies are less scarce, the main need is for overseas aid to help poor African and Central American countries to administer the vaccines. We are almost there.