Foreign Correspondence, Vol 23
Western countries created a vaccine gap—China and Russia are filling it
Hello, and happy Friday! This correspondence is going to be a bit shorter than usual. Your inboxes are already cluttered and, frankly, so is my brain. Plus, it’s a four-day weekend here in Britain and I’m very keen to get out in the sun and enjoy it.
In our last correspondence, I wrote about some of the challenges facing France amid its third wave of the pandemic: vaccine hesitancy, supply issues, and, as of this week, a third national lockdown. I was chuffed to see my reporting featured in this segment by the BBC’s Ros Atkins, whose comprehensive explainers are essential viewing. You can tune in below (I appear at the 3:45 mark):
In podcast news: I joined The Bunker this week to chat about vaccine distribution, Scottish independence, and the symbolism of banknotes (or dollar bills, for my fellow Americans). You can tune in via your favorite podcast app or by clicking here.
What I’ve written
After reporting on vaccine nationalism and the governments keeping their vaccines to themselves, I decided to turn my attention to the countries that have been giving much of their doses away—namely, China and Russia.
Though they’re not the only countries distributing vaccines around the world—India and, to a smaller extent, Israel have done the same—their efforts have been singled out by leaders in the U.S. and Europe as a cause for concern. 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 Western leaders haven’t offered the receiving countries of China and Russia’s “vaccine diplomacy” any alternative. Instead, they are complaining about Beijing and Moscow filling a vaccine accessibility gap that they helped create. In my latest, I ask: Is that so wrong? Keep reading here
What I’ve read
I’m only spotlighting one story this week, and it’s this breathtaking essay in the New York Review of Books about the life of Abed Salama, which lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. Whether you’re familiar with the conflict or not, it’s a moving piece of writing and worth every bit of your time:
For over half a century, Israel’s strategic dilemma has been its inability to erase the Palestinians, on one hand, and its unwillingness to grant them civil and political rights, on the other. Explaining his opposition to giving Palestinians in the West Bank the same rights as Palestinian citizens of Israel, Abba Eban said that there was a limit to the amount of arsenic the human body could absorb. Between the two poles of mass expulsion and political inclusion, the unhappy compromise Israel found was to fragment the Palestinian population, ensuring that its scattered pieces could not organize as one national collective.
What I’m thinking about
The Big Stuck Boat and the incredible memes it inspired, like this one:
Until next time,
Yasmeen