68 days is all it took for Ethiopian Airlines and Alibaba’s logistics division Cainiao to build a new air bridge between China and Africa that will ferry vaccines through distribution hubs in Addis Ababa and Dubai.
The first flight landed on Saturday at Bole International Airport laden with vaccines bound for N’Djamena in Chad.
The geopolitical optics of this are very important right now. With one African leader after another pleading with the world’s wealthy countries to stop hoarding vaccines and make them available to middle and low-income states, the Chinese have launched a full-scale vaccine distribution blitz.
In addition to the jabs that arrived in Chad over the weekend, the Chinese announced new donations to the Republic of Congo and Egypt, and are reportedly in talks to provide relief to Nigeria and dozens of other countries across Africa and the developing world.
And when U.S. and European leaders are heard complaining about the Chinese taking advantage of the situation in pursuit of soft power gains, people just shake their heads in frustration. Of course the Chinese are moving quickly to advance their own political objectives. Why wouldn’t they? They’d be dumb not to.
Rather than just sit back and complain about the Chinese, those wealthy states would be well-advised to act quickly and release some of the millions of doses they’ve reserved in advance and make them available to the world’s poorest countries.
But let’s be honest, we know that’s not going to happen given the current difficulties that both U.S. and European states are facing with their own vaccine distribution drives.
So, in the optics battle related to vaccines, the U.S. and Europe have been largely marginalized, while the Chinese are emerging as the clear frontrunner, followed by the Russians and Indians.
