Abstract
Vaccine diplomacy is a subject of medical diplomacy that has been used for some time. Recently, it has been widely used to address the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). As global health challenges, particularly pandemics, bite, many countries with the necessary capacity leverage their advancement in developed vaccines to gain diplomatic mileage. However, there has been observed limited documentation of vaccine diplomacy outside the USA and the European Union. Through the tracking of proclamations by the Chinese, Indian and Russian authorities and associated authentic sources, this paper investigates the extent to which COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy took root in the focus countries up to 22 April 2021. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tools were applied to present the spatial dimensions of COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy. Findings show that several initiatives to deploy COVID-19 vaccines developed in China, India, and Russia took place worldwide. Among the vaccines deployed were China’s CoronaVac and Sinopharm, India’s Covishield and Russia’s Sputnik V. However, the vaccine diplomacy was not free of incidences as debates on efficacy, effectiveness, and safety played out. While acknowledging that COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy from the study countries was solid, the paper recommends that vaccine recipient countries remain open-minded regarding the ultimate purpose of the seemingly ‘ethical’ and global solidarity drive, making COVID-19 a genuinely global public good.
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Notes
- 1.
This term is taken to collectively refer to emergency use authorisations, formal approvals and other forms authorising the marketing of the COVID-19 vaccines in a particular country.
- 2.
These countries included Bahrain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Turkey, and the UAE.
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Chikodzi, D., Nhamo, G. (2023). COVID-19 Vaccine Diplomacy: Tracking the Chinese, Indian and Russian Global Pathways and Undertones. In: Chapungu, L., Chikodzi, D., Dube, K. (eds) The COVID-19 - Health Systems Nexus. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21602-2_14
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