No one was really sure what to expect from President Xi Jinping’s pledge last May to make Chinese COVID-19 vaccines a “global public good.” In typical Chinese fashion, there was no explanation of what he meant, instead, Chinese officials for months just kept repeating “global public good, global public good, global public good…”
So, no one really knew for sure.
Bear in mind that President Xi’s promise came around the same time last year when the Jack Ma Foundation impressively mobilized a massive PPE donation campaign that distributed face masks and other materials to every African country. So, it wasn’t unreasonable at the time to think that China would follow a similar model with vaccines and adhere to the long-established definition of a global public good “whose benefits are of nearly universal reach or potentially affecting anyone anywhere.”
“COVID-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, will be made a global public good… This will be China’s contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries.”
chinese president xi jinping in a speech to the world health assembly on may 18, 2020
That expectation was further heightened last November when Alibaba’s logistics division Cainiao signed an agreement with Ethiopian Airlines for what was touted as a China-Africa air bridge that would transport millions of vaccines as part of a state-of-the-art cold chain. While that’s definitely now happening, it’s nowhere near as large in scale as what was expected and significantly less ambitious than even the Jack Ma Foundation’s distribution effort.
But now, almost a year after the president’s pledge, we have a pretty clear view of what the Chinese government means when it says “global public good.” For the most part, China’s vaccine donations are small in scale, bilateral, and, in some cases, not very affordable.
Now, this may seem counterintuitive, especially since China has embarrassed the U.S. and Europe for their shameful vaccine hoarding by distributing hundreds of millions of jabs to developing countries around the world. China should be commended for that. The problem is, though, selling vaccines at $19 or $36 a dose and making donations that are often so small that only a country’s elites stand to benefit is not a “global public good.”
Had President Xi been genuinely serious about living up to the standard of a global public good, here’s what he could have done:
1) IP WAIVER: Rather than sell or donate small quantities of vaccines to developing countries, China could have instead waived the intellectual property rights on one or more of its vaccines that would allow poor countries to manufacture large quantities of vaccines at the lowest possible price.
2) COVAX: China was late to joining the global Covax alliance and when it did eventually commit, Beijing donated a paltry 10 million doses. At the low end of the retail price card, say $19 a dose that Sinopharm charged the Senegalese, that’s a $190 million donation. At wholesale prices, that figure is probably a lot lower. For a $15 trillion economy, that’s a pretty modest contribution, to say the least. Had China truly been serious about both multilateralism and meeting the expectations of providing a global public good, it would have done a lot more to bolster the Covax initiative rather than pursue opaque bilateral deals.
Once production ramps up in earnest around the world, as is now starting to happen, China’s advantage in vaccine donations and distribution will disappear. And the next time you hear Beijing promise to provide something as a “global public good,” it’d be wise to keep your expectations in check.
