India Wins China in Vaccine Diplomacy

India takes vaccine diplomacy equally seriously. In Parliament, on Wednesday, the Foreign Minister, S. Jaishankar, declared that the country’s “Vaccine Friendship” program “elevated India’s position and generated great international goodwill”.

The donation or export of medical supplies allows Beijing and New Delhi to enhance their soft power, showcase their technological prowess, give their companies a safe foothold in new markets and boast to their home audience that they are the main players on the world stage. With Western nations preoccupied with inoculating their own populations, the Asian giants are struggling to make the most of the opportunity.

The leaders of Sri Lanka and Dominica personally received shipments of vaccines made in India at the airport, and the Mongolian prime minister gave an injection made in India. Chinese vaccines inoculated the Turkish Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Indonesian Joko Widodo and the president of Seychelles. In Europe, Chinese vaccines have been established in Serbia, Hungary, North Macedonia and Montenegro.

India’s huge pharmaceutical industry is responsible for about 20% of the world’s generic drugs and over 60% of all global vaccine production. A Foreign Ministry website lists 72 countries that have received about 60 million doses of vaccines from Covid made in India. A private company, Serum Institute of India, together with the Anglo-Swedish company AstraZeneca and Novavax based in Maryland, has pledged 1.1 billion doses for Covax, the effort led by the World Health Organization to provide vaccines to the world’s poorest countries .

According to official statistics, widely contested by experts, Beijing did a far better job than New Delhi in containing the pandemic at home: only about 5,000 Chinese people died, compared with about 160,000 Indians. It is difficult to obtain independently verified numbers, but the Chinese leadership in vaccine diplomacy is much more restricted – if that is an advantage. According to a recent essay in Foreign Affairs by Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chinese companies have so far received orders for about 572 million doses and promised another 10 million to Covax. China’s Foreign Ministry says it plans to supply free vaccines to 69 countries and sell them to 28 other countries.

Last week, New Delhi’s Quad partners – a free group from the United States, Japan, Australia and India – took action to boost India’s efforts. In a virtual summit, the first involving the leaders of the four countries, Quad pledged to provide at least one billion doses of vaccines, including one developed by Johnson & Johnson,

for the Indo-Pacific nations by the end of next year. The USA, Japan and Australia will finance the production and delivery of the vaccines by a private Indian company, Biological E. Australia, and will use their experience in regional logistics to deliver them.

Pooling their strengths makes sense for Quad countries, and the vaccine initiative should calm critics who see the group as little more than a chat shop. The Southeast Asian focus backs off directly against Beijing’s efforts to dominate the region. But both the new initiative and the success of vaccine diplomacy in New Delhi offer a broader lesson for India. It is far more likely to achieve its goals by collaborating closely with Western democracies than by embarking on a quixotic search for “self-reliance”.

Against a backdrop of growing nationalism, the Modi government portrayed its vaccination effort as part of a successful search to create a “self-sufficient India”. He rushed to emergency approval for a domestic vaccine developed by an Indian pharmaceutical company, Bharat Biotech, despite not having completed phase 3 testing at the time. On March 1, a nurse administered the unproven Indian vaccine to Mr. Modi.

In reality, India’s vaccination capacity comes from collaboration, not self-reliance. See the Serum Institute, the company that gives India much of its Covid vaccine muscle, pumping 2.5 million doses a day of the AstraZeneca vaccine and collaborating with other Western companies, including Novovax. The “Made in India” vaccine that Indian diplomats tout was developed by AstraZeneca in collaboration with the University of Oxford and with financial assistance from the US Serum Institute took the risk by starting to manufacture the AstraZeneca vaccine before it became clear that it would be approved by WHO , UK or India. (US regulators have yet to approve it.) But that risk was underwritten in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which promised to offset potential losses.

So far, the AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved by the WHO and widely welcomed in many countries. China’s vaccines, criticized by critics for lack of data transparency and, in some cases, a low rate of effectiveness, lack this international imprimatur. If Covid vaccines made in India are welcome around the world, it is partly because they are backed by the transparency and rigor of Western medicine. Often, funding from Western NGOs increases their attractiveness.

There is nothing wrong with India’s ambition to develop home vaccines. But, as the country’s own experience shows, India does best when it is open and collaborative – and gets a little help from its Western friends.