At this past weekend’s G-20 summit, leaders spoke via video, and the topic was, of course, the Great Plague that is rebounding around the world. In his remarks, Xi Jinping, true to his rhetorical nature, spoke in favor of a vaccine to be developed as a public good so that poor countries can share in it. He also proposed the creation of an international health code that would allow those who are tested free of the virus to travel freely across countries and accelerate the recovery of global economic activity.
China’s domestic implementation of a health code, which would allow the government to track an individual’s health information, where he or she is, where he or she is going, and where he or she is stored on a cell phone, has been pointed out by many as a further expansion of the Chinese Communist Party’s digital totalitarian surveillance of its people through the epidemic. Xi Jinping’s talk of exporting this practice to the world caused an immediate outcry.
Even in Hong Kong, it is extremely difficult to implement a technology that treats personal privacy as a non-issue, let alone in a liberal democracy. Even if you don’t care about people’s privacy, you have to worry about the reliability of Chinese tests. It would be another disaster for China to export the virus if, intentionally or unintentionally, Chinese tests made mistakes and allowed many patients who were actually carrying the virus but could not be tested to travel around the world. The world remembers that earlier this year the Chinese Communist Party concealed the outbreak in China, and then, unable to do so, kept emphasizing that the virus was similar to the common flu, and denounced the closure of the country as racist, leading to the export of the virus to the world by a large number of Chinese patients. This was the origin of the global plague. It seems that not many countries will be interested in this International Health Code proposal in the end.
As for the proposal to turn vaccines into public money, it has been echoed by many developing countries, international organizations such as the World Health Organization and even some European countries. After all, if epidemics in poor countries are not controlled, even if they are controlled in developed countries, the global economy will not really recover. No one would object to the idea of turning vaccines into public money.
But a vaccine is not something that falls from the sky, and the cost of developing an effective and safe vaccine is enormous. Pharmaceutical companies in the United States and other developed countries have been able to launch vaccines in less than a year because the European and American governments have spent huge sums of money to order large quantities of vaccines that have not yet been developed. With these resources, pharmaceutical companies are able to accelerate development and testing.
These countries invest huge resources in vaccines, and of course their citizens are the first to be vaccinated when they become available. It is understandable that poor countries would want their citizens to be vaccinated and then have access to the vaccine themselves as soon as it becomes available. It is shameless for the Chinese government, the originator of the global epidemic, to advocate that vaccines become public money and take the moral high ground to pressure the United States to distribute vaccines around the world.
China’s concealment of the epidemic led to a global catastrophe, and the world missed an early opportunity to stop the epidemic in China. The subsequent failure of some countries to control the epidemic does not negate China’s responsibility for causing the epidemic. This is similar to how the inability of firefighters to effectively control a forest fire does not offset the liability of the arsonist who started the fire in the first place. The Chinese government, which owes the world, is now trying to be generous at the expense of others, and is acting as a rogue by forcing countries that have invested enormous resources in vaccine development to give the results to their neighbors for free. The U.S. government has also discovered that Chinese hackers have systematically tried to steal the results of U.S. vaccine research.
If China really cares about the lack of access to vaccines in poor countries, why can’t China buy vaccines from Europe and America on behalf of those poor countries? The Chinese government, itself, boasts that China’s self-developed vaccines are also very effective and safe, and are being introduced even faster than in the West. If Chinese vaccines are so great, why doesn’t the Chinese government take the lead in distributing these vaccines to poor countries for free? Why be generous at the expense of the United States?
The Chinese pharmaceutical companies, which have never released data from clinical trials of Chinese vaccines, have stopped testing in Brazil because of the mysterious deaths of patients involved in the trials. The safety and efficacy of these vaccines is highly questionable. However, there has been a rush to purchase these dubious vaccines throughout China. This is contradictory to the Chinese government’s announcement that the epidemic in China has long been zero.
China caused the global catastrophe, has been evading responsibility, continues to hide it, and now wants to rob the affected countries of their hard-earned vaccine development. If there is a positive meaning to this pandemic, it is to show the world the hypocrisy and roguery of the Chinese Communist Party.
Recent Comments