While Western countries spar over access to the world’s vaccine supply, China and Russia have been busy giving away theirs. This distribution of millions of doses, either for free or cheaply, to low- and middle-income nations has been met with skepticism by leaders in the United States and Europe, many of whom have raised concerns over the safety of the jabs, as well as Beijing’s and Moscow’s motivations for sharing them.
In their telling, Chinese and Russian vaccines lack transparent data about their efficacy, and are being leveraged as a form of soft power to bolster the countries’ global standing. More fundamentally, China and Russia are using their jabs to entrench their presence in parts of the world where they seek greater sway, as part of a “vaccine war of influence.”
All of this is undoubtedly true. But if a war is taking place, the U.S. and Europe have been notably absent, prioritizing their domestic needs instead. This inward focus, coupled with the vaccine nationalism that has seen wealthy countries dominate the available supply, has created an accessibility gap that Beijing and Moscow have proved all too willing to fill. Though U.S. and European leaders might not like it, they are effectively complaining about a problem that they helped create, and, paradoxically, they are undermining their own interests—in fact, Russian and Chinese vaccine diplomacy is helping the West.
