China to take part in WHO-backed vaccine program

Bloomberg

China will take part in a World Health Organization-backed effort to provide a coronavirus vaccine to developing nations, filling a void in global health leadership after US President Donald Trump spurned the program.
Beijing joined the $18 billion Covax initiative that aspires to give lower-income countries the same access to vaccines as wealthier nations. The move came despite China “leading the world with several vaccines in advanced stages of R&D and with ample production capacity,” spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a statement. “We are taking this concrete step to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, especially to developing countries, and hope more capable countries will also join and support Covax,” she said.
The move, which comes some three weeks after a deadline set by the initiative, allows China to positively contrast itself with the US as tensions between the world’s two biggest economies spiral on fronts from trade to technology and human rights. The Trump administration has withdrawn from the WHO and refused to join Covax, with a spokesman for the White House saying the US wouldn’t “be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt WHO and China.”
President Xi Jinping promised in May that vaccines developed by China would be made a global “public good” to be shared by all. The decision could also help the country’s image following widespread criticism from abroad over how it handled the initial outbreak in the central city of Wuhan, where Covid-19 first emerged last year. A global survey this week by the Pew Research Center found that negative perceptions of China reached record highs in the US and other major economies.
“In many ways this is a soft power win for China, coming amidst a slew of negative reports in other fields in recent weeks,” said Nicholas Thomas, an associate professor in health security at the City University of Hong Kong. “It is a win made all the easier by President Trump’s impetuous decision to withdraw from the WHO and his short-sighted refusal to commit the US to Covax.