Covid Vaccines: New Diplomacy Tool for India and China

But the prime minister started losing his grip on power last year. As both Chinese and Indian delegations arrived in Kathmandu to steer Nepal’s domestic political jockeying, the Nepali leader seems to have lowered the temperature with India.

After Mr. Oli sent his foreign minister for talks in New Delhi, India donated one million doses. China’s Sinopharm has also applied for Nepal’s approval of its vaccine, but drug authorities there have not given it the go ahead.

“The vaccine emerged as an opportunity to normalize ties” between Nepal and India, said Tanka Karki, a former Nepali envoy to China.

Still, the strategy of using vaccines to win hearts and minds isn’t always successful.

The United Arab Emirates, which is rolling out vaccines faster than any country except Israel, has begun donating Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccines it purchased to countries where it has strategic or commercial interests, including 50,000 doses each to the Seychelles, the island nation in the Indian Ocean, and Egypt, one of its Arab allies.

But in Egypt some doctors balked at using them, because they said they did not trust the data the U.A.E. and the vaccine’s Chinese maker had released about trials. The government of Malaysia, one of the Emirates’ biggest trading partners, declined an offer of 500,000 doses, saying that regulators would have to independently approve the Sinopharm vaccine. After regulatory approval, Malaysia bought vaccines instead from Pfizer of the United States, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine and one made by another Chinese company, Sinovac.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/world/asia/vaccine-diplomacy-india-china.html