China opens travel to foreigners who take Chinese vaccines Covid-19, as geopolitical vaccine silos emerge

Hong Kong (CNN) – China is making it easier for foreigners to enter the country. But there is a condition: they must have received a Covid-19 made in China vaccine.

China’s Foreign Ministry says the move is to start international travel in an “orderly manner”, and vaccinated travelers will still face state quarantine upon arrival.

But experts raised concerns about China’s decision to prioritize domestic vaccines over those approved by the World Health Organization, and with a higher rate of effectiveness.

They say there is a risk of putting pressure on countries to approve Chinese vaccines and set a dangerous precedent that, if adopted by other nations, could leave the world in vaccine-based silos.

It also raises practical questions – what options do people have if they live in countries that have not approved vaccines made in China?

“It is the most important thing in vaccine diplomacy,” said Nicholas Thomas, associate professor of health security at City University in Hong Kong. “(You are) essentially saying that if you want to visit us, you need to get our vaccine.”

What is behind the change?

The timing of China’s new visa rules is remarkable.

China has been one of several countries at the forefront of vaccine development and, by March 15, China had exported vaccines to 28 countries, according to the Chinese Mission to the UN. Mass public vaccination programs with Chinese vaccines are underway in Indonesia and Turkey. In China alone, 65 million people have been vaccinated with the five vaccines approved and produced domestically.

This means that China cannot claim its preference for home vaccines because they are superior to other vaccines. Instead, Thomas sees China’s new visa rules as a “power play” that will pressure people to get one of China’s vaccines.

Sarah Chan, a bioethics reader at the University of Edinburgh’s Faculty of Medicine, says that if someone’s livelihood depends on traveling to China on business, it may compel him to get the vaccines, despite the lack of data. Scott Rosenstein, director of the Eurasia Group’s global health program, said he could also pressure countries to authorize Chinese vaccines.

Some people may have health problems that make it impossible to make certain injections. “There is simply no reason to do so much of what we do depending on whether or not we have a vaccine, let alone having a specific version of the vaccine,” said Chan.

Although China’s new visa rules encourage travelers to take Chinese vaccines, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, rejected the idea of ​​”vaccine nationalism”.

What are the long-term effects?

China’s decision comes at a time when countries around the world face the broader issue of launching so-called “immunity passports” to open international trips for people who have antibodies to the coronavirus – either because they have recovered from it or through a vaccine.

But that leads to more questions – if an immunity passport gives special rights to people who have been vaccinated, which vaccines should be counted?

Another option is to allow the 194 member states of the World Health Organization to vote – vaccines approved and recognized by most countries would set the standard, according to Thomas.

But a uniform vaccine passport to the world is still a long way off. For now, countries are likely to simply recognize the vaccines they have approved for use – and there are already signs that this is leading to silos.

“It is this eye-for-eye challenge that I think will be interesting to watch,” said Rosenstein. “This will create some tension and increase the pre-existing tension in vaccine diplomacy.”

Rosenstein said that people may even choose to have several vaccines so that they can travel to other regions – a measure that is unlikely to have negative health effects, but that could harm the supply of the vaccine.

What is the best way to go?

Chan sees a number of problems with immunity passports, especially the high-tech digital ones that come with data privacy issues. She also points out that, once everyone has a chance to be vaccinated, vaccine passports can quickly become obsolete – meaning that the money could be better spent elsewhere.

A better approach would be to ensure that vaccines are as widely available as possible, she said. So, when a large part of the world’s population has been vaccinated, immigration authorities can use simpler approaches, such as asking the public to report whether they have received any vaccines. If some people were to lie, the risk to the general population would still be small, since most people had been vaccinated, she added.

Thomas also hopes for an ideal scenario, in which countries do not follow the example of China – instead, they treat all vaccinated people in the same way, regardless of the vaccine, as long as the vaccine has data that prove its effectiveness. He hopes that countries will be able to stop treating the vaccine launch like a race and instead treat it as a global health problem.

“Viruses don’t care about borders, they don’t care about nationalities or races or religions or ideologies or ethnicities or anything like that, they just want to replicate and mutate,” he said.

“And I think that unless we take a truly global approach to vaccines and recognize that we simply have to do the best at the global level, we will see latent Covid wells emerging again in the future and possibly as the second wave of Spanish flu, which has suffered a mutation that makes it worse than before. “