It did not take long for the seeds of Russian vaccination diplomacy in South America to show their first signs.
Shortly after Moscow sold 5.2 million doses of its Sputnik V vaccine, President Vladimir Putin was on the phone with his Bolivian counterpart, Luis Arce, in late January, discussing topics as varied as the construction of a nuclear power plant until the lithium mining and gas reserves.
In North Africa, Algeria did not pay a penny for Chinese vaccines that arrived in March. What she offered was to support Beijing’s “core interests” and oppose interference in its “internal affairs” – language that China has used to defend itself against criticism of Hong Kong’s autonomy and allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which denies it.
Although China and Russia deny it, experts say they are beginning to see how Beijing and Moscow’s strategy to sell or donate their vaccines abroad is lubricating the gears of their international relations and allowing them to expand their influence around the world.
It is a development that should cause great concern for the United States and other democracies, according to former ambassadors and other former US diplomats.
What irritates these observers is not that China and Russia are winning in vaccine diplomacy, it is that the United States and others are not even in the game yet. Washington and its allies preferred to prioritize their domestic populations, keeping most doses at home and causing resentment abroad.
“The United States, until recently, was the right country for any major health disaster,” said Thomas Shannon, the former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the United States, the State Department’s third highest office. “So leaving the playing field is very disconcerting.”
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Shannon, who served in the administration of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump and was an ambassador to Brazil from 2010 to 2013, said that Trump’s decision to depart from Covid-19’s international response sent a “scary message and worrying to many countries that are at a very vulnerable time. “
Unless that changes under President Joe Biden and in the future, “the world will realize that we are not a reliable partner and that would be dangerous for us,” he said. “I believe it is something that will be remembered.”
‘Extremely narrow-minded’
Few would argue that sending life-saving vaccines around the world is a bad thing.
“We are not talking about arms sales here,” said John Campbell, who was the United States ambassador to Nigeria from 2004 to 2007. “We are talking about something that citizens around the world desperately want and need.”
In fact, both countries deny the export of vaccines for diplomatic gain.
That idea is “extremely narrow-minded,” said Guo Weimin, a spokesman for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, at its annual meeting last month. President Xi Jinping has promised to make vaccines a “global public good”.
Similarly, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia simply believes that “there should be as many doses of vaccines as possible” so that “all countries, including the poorest, have the opportunity to stop the pandemic. “.
After a cloud of skepticism, recent studies suggest that state vaccines, China’s Sinopharm and Russia’s Sputnik V program, are just as effective as others. They have been approved by dozens of regulators.
Of the approximately 250 million doses of vaccines it has produced so far, China has sent 118 million to 49 countries, according to Airfinity, a London-based pharmaceutical testing company.
Russia has sent vaccines to 22 different countries, and India has exported or donated 64 million of the nearly 150 million vaccines it has produced, according to Airfinity, which some experts interpret as a New Delhi attempt to counterbalance the country’s diplomatic openings. vaccine from its regional rival, Beijing.
In contrast, the United States has distributed just over 200 million doses of vaccines to its own population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She agreed to share only a small number – about 4 million photos from AstraZeneca-Oxford University that she was not using anyway – with Mexico and Canada.
The West’s own vaccination nationalism created a vacuum in which low- and middle-income countries were unable to access vaccines. And Beijing and Moscow were very happy to intervene.
‘Political suicide’
Most doses of Chinese and Russian vaccines have been “where Western powers and Russia and China have been competing for years for more influence,” said Agathe Demarais, director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research group based in London.
An important battleground is Egypt, which receives US $ 1.3 billion in aid from the United States every year, but whose human rights situation has led to strained relations with the West. She ordered tens of millions of doses from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Sinopharm and the Russian program Sputnik V. But the first to arrive in Cairo in January were from China.
“For the man on the street” in African countries that use vaccines, “Russia and China become somewhat more attractive as possible models for the future,” said Campbell, the former ambassador to Nigeria. “It will undoubtedly help to increase the attractiveness of authoritarian forms of government at the expense of more democratic forms of government.”
The pandemic has also allowed Russia to build relationships in Latin America beyond its traditional base in Venezuela, said Shannon, while the link between Russian and Bolivian presidents was clearly linked to the vaccine agreement, said Demarais. The Bolivian presidency did not respond to a request for comment.
And in Eastern Europe, the use of Chinese and Russian shots allowed Serbia and Hungary to fly ahead of their neighbors who were struggling with choked Western supplies.
Vaccine sharing is by no means the only way for Moscow and Beijing to try to expand their influence. Its scale is overshadowed by Russian arms sales, for example, or by China’s Belt and Road infrastructure plan.
Instead, vaccine diplomacy is “another brick in the building” in its decades-long attempt to gain influence in the global South and challenge the postwar order, said Demarais, a former French diplomat who worked in Moscow and the Middle East.
“The pandemic did not create new trends. It is just accelerated continuous changes, ”she said. “The fragmentation of the global world order has been going on for a long time.”
Meanwhile, China has two advantages that Western countries do not. After quickly crushing his outbreak, he has less urgency to keep vaccines at home. And your one-party state doesn’t have to worry about voter discontent.
“It would be political suicide for Biden to say, ‘My dear fellow countrymen, I am going to send millions of vaccines to South America or Africa just because we need to compete with Russia and China,'” said Demarais.
Beijing and Moscow have also perfected the art of vaccine public relations.
“The Chinese are adept at acting quickly, making symbolic donations – and getting a lot of press coverage for that,” said Richard Olson, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.
‘We lost the game’
Now, the United States seems to be trying to change the international picture.
While Trump has shown little interest in global vaccine efforts, Biden has changed the tone dramatically. He gave $ 4 billion to COVAX, a vaccine-sharing plan, and asked allies to give their surpluses to the poorest countries.
The United States, India, Japan and Australia recently launched a counter-offensive, planning to donate 1 billion doses of vaccines by 2023.
Asked about vaccine diplomacy at a meeting last month, State Department deputy spokeswoman Jalina Porter declined to discuss China and said that “the United States has taken a leading role in fighting this pandemic globally. “.
But many fear it is too late.
Biden’s focus is still blatantly domestic. He bought hundreds of millions of vaccines for American weapons and sought to donate to developing countries only once each American adult received a vaccination offer.
“If I were still assigned to an embassy, I would say that we need to play the game here,” said Demarais. “But I would also say that I think we lost the game.”