US strives to overtake China in Latin America Vaccine diplomacy

The United States is ramping up delivery of coronavirus vaccines to Latin America in a bid to address the region’s public health crisis, but the effort could also hamper China’s efforts to exert its vaccine exports to for purposes of geopolitical influence.

US President Joe Biden has said the United States will export up to 80 million vaccines to other countries, and in recent weeks his administration has announced a series of deliveries to countries in Central and South America, including initial shipments of 2.5 million doses of vaccine to Colombia, 2 million doses to Peru, 3 million doses to Brazil, 1 million doses to Paraguay, 1.5 million doses to Honduras and 1.35 million doses in Mexico.

The United States is ramping up delivery of coronavirus vaccines to Latin America in a bid to address the region’s public health crisis, but the effort could also hamper China’s efforts to exert its vaccine exports to for purposes of geopolitical influence.

US President Joe Biden has said the United States will export up to 80 million vaccines to other countries, and in recent weeks his administration has announced a series of deliveries to countries in Central and South America, including initial shipments of 2.5 million doses of vaccine to Colombia, 2 million doses to Peru, 3 million doses to Brazil, 1 million doses to Paraguay, 1.5 million doses to Honduras and 1.35 million doses in Mexico.

The wave of announcements signal that the United States is turning a corner in vaccine diplomacy in Latin America after lagging behind Russia and China for months in early vaccine exports to the region.

Overall, when you look at what the United States has shared, Latin America has been by far the biggest beneficiary. And that’s just the start, said Juan Gonzalez, senior director for the Western Hemisphere at the White House National Security Council.

Gonzalez said the administration’s top priority is to deal with the public health crisis as a new coronavirus outbreak hits countries in Latin America.

Experts said there was also a geopolitical element to vaccine shipments as the United States sought to overtake the vaccine response from Russia and China in the region.

I don’t see this as a zero-sum game, but that doesn’t mean that vaccine diplomacy itself doesn’t have geopolitical or foreign policy implications, said Pepe Zhang, associate director at the Atlantic Council and expert in relations between China and Latin America. If Chinese vaccines are the only solution available in a country, it potentially puts China in a position to pursue additional interests or priorities.

Western officials have previously accused Moscow and Beijing of using vaccines for geopolitical purposes. Paraguay and Honduras, for example, said they were under pressure to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan in exchange for receiving vaccines made in China. Countries that recently agreed to sever ties with Taiwan in favor of China, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Panama were among the first recipients of Chinese vaccines. And Brazil has reversed its decision to ban Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from expanding its 5G network in a bid to collect as many Chinese vaccines as possible.

In order to have more access, presence and influence in the region, [China] and Russia are profiting from the pandemic, deploying increasingly promising and insufficient medical diplomacy and disinformation campaigns, Admiral Craig Faller, commander of the US Southern Command, testified before the Senate in March.

Gonzalez said the Biden administration was not dissuading countries in the region from accepting Russian or Chinese vaccines, but worried about how the two countries are using vaccines as leverage.

At the start of the administration, countries contacted us and asked what our reaction would be if they accepted vaccines from China or Russia, Gonzalez said. Our answer was: you have to immunize your populations, and you have to make these decisions according to your national interest. I wasn’t going to tell you not to do this.

He added, however, that we were concerned about reports that China and Russia were using vaccine diplomacy to strike political deals.

Now, the delivery of millions of doses of vaccine to the United States could start to blunt China’s vaccine diplomacy efforts, easing pressure on Latin American governments and providing them with new vaccine supply options as they go. they are scrambling to cope with outbreaks of deadly new strains of coronavirus.

COVID-19 cases are worsening in Latin America and the Caribbean, where only 1 in 10 people have been vaccinated. Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, called the situation unacceptable during a press conference on June 30. South American countries make up only 5% of the world’s population, but around 25% of the number of coronavirus deaths globally.

Scientists are also closely monitoring the Lambda variant that causes COVID-19, a variant that first appeared in Peru late last year. There is no indication yet that Lambda could be as deadly or widespread as the Delta variant that dominates infections in the United States, but the spread of the variants underscores how the virus can evolve further in a region hit hard by the pandemic without an adequate supply of it. vaccines.

The Biden administration does not plan to deliver vaccines to autocratic countries that could use the vaccines to consolidate their power, namely Nicaragua, where Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega appears to be using vaccine supplies to gain political support amidst a radical crackdown on political opponents.

An important yardstick when it comes to sharing vaccines is that we want to make sure they’re not used politically or for social control purposes, Gonzalez said.

Despite the delivery of millions of American vaccines, many countries in Latin America are far from bringing the epidemic under control. Some public health experts believe the region will experience coronavirus outbreaks until 2024 and that potential new strains from these outbreaks could quickly spread to other parts of the world.

At the end of the day, it’s not just about this region, Zheng said. While there are new variants from any region of the world, the rest of the world is also dangerous.

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