 |
| Sinovaxing a Manila resident |
It must be really bad when Republicans and Democrats agree on something. In this case that China is ripping off the UN body in charge of distributing Covid vaccines.
China stands to make billions by selling 550 million shots to the UN.
That's after staring the whole mess in the first place.
I had the impression that China had been quite generous in distributing its Sinovac worldwide. It turns out, not so much …
/Snip:
Beijing has been exploiting the pandemic to advance its political and financial interests since covid-19 emerged in late 2019 in China. The latest and perhaps most egregious example came this week, when Covax, the World Health Organization-backed initiative, announced its new plan to purchase up to 550 million doses of China's Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, with expected costs in the billions.
This deal struck both U.S. lawmakers and some senior members of the Biden administration as scandalous, for several obvious reasons. Not only have the Chinese-made vaccines been shown to be less effective, but China has also contributed no money to the Covax program and has donated zero shots from its national stockpile. By contrast, the United States is Covax's largest donor, having pledged $4 billion, and has begun distributing 55 million donated shots and promised to donate 500 million more, no charge.
During Wednesday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, ranking Republican James E. Risch (Idaho) called the Covax contract "appalling." He asked Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to comment on "the irony that China has contributed nothing to Covax and yet now stands to profit from it, when indeed, they started this whole mess in the first place."
Power agreed, saying: "It is appalling that Beijing chose to make a profit on those vaccines rather than to contribute financially to Covax or to donate its state-owned vaccines to Covax to reach people in their hour of desperate need."
