Will a little sentence uttered by a scientist ruin several months of diplomatic work by the second world power? By declaring, Saturday April 10, during a scientific conference, that “The currently existing vaccines do not have a very high protection rate”, Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, threw a stone in the pond.
Since December 2020, while rejecting the term “Vaccine diplomacy”, China supplies its vaccines to a good part of the planet. On April 5, the Japanese site Nikkei Asia, which cannot be suspected of complacency towards Beijing, noted that “China appears to be the big winner of the radiation of vaccines”.
While the United States hardly exports Pfizer and the Europeans and the British are tearing each other apart for doses of AstraZeneca, the vaccines produced by the Chinese Sinopharm and Sinovac are sold or distributed in dozens of countries, emerging but also in Europe. Westerners think only of themselves? Fortunately, China thinks first of “Community of destiny for humanity” and does his vaccines “A global public good”.
No scientific publication
It had not escaped anyone’s notice that these had so far not been the subject of any scientific publication and that they had still not been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) but , faced with the anxiety of their fellow citizens, the leaders of many countries saw in Chinese vaccines their only lifeline.
“We have supplied more than 160 countries and international organizations”, even said, Monday, April 12, Wang Yi, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a speech of self-congratulation celebrating “Openness and prosperity” of his country a year after the end of the containment of Wuhan.
Does Gao Fu’s confession call this diplomacy into question? The question is hot enough that, on Monday, it is impossible to find the recording of Professor Fu’s words on Chinese social networks. On the contrary, on Sunday evening, he explained to the Global Times that we had misunderstood. He was not referring to Chinese vaccines but to vaccines in general. “The rates of protection for all vaccines around the world are sometimes high and sometimes low. Increasing their effectiveness is a question that needs to be studied by scientists around the world ”, he said.
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