China opens trip to foreigners taking Chinese Covid-19 vaccines as geopolitical vaccine silos emerge

Hong Kong (CNN) – China makes it easier for foreigners to enter the country. But there is one condition: they must have received a China-made Covid-19 vaccine.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry says the move is to embark on an “orderly” international trip, and vaccinated travelers will still face the state-controlled quarantine.

But experts expressed concern about China’s decision to prioritize domestic vaccines over those approved by the World Health Organization, and with a higher efficiency rate.

They say it runs the risk of setting countries up to approve Chinese vaccinations, creating a dangerous precedent that, if adopted by other nations, could leave the world in silos on the vaccine.

It also raises practical issues – what options do people have if they live in countries that have not been approved by China-made vaccinations?

“This is very much at the sharp end of vaccine diplomacy,” said Nicholas Thomas, associate professor of health security at City University in Hong Kong. “(It is) essentially say if you want to visit us, you have to take our vaccine.”

What’s behind the move?

The timing of China’s new visa rules is remarkable.

China was one of a number of countries at the forefront of vaccine development and on March 15, according to the Chinese mission to China, China exported vaccinations to 28 countries. Massive public vaccination programs with Chinese vaccinations are underway in Indonesia and Turkey. In China alone, 65 million people have been vaccinated with the country’s five approved local vaccines.

This means that China can not claim that its preference for indigenous vaccines is due to the fact that it is better than other vaccines. Instead, Thomas views the new visa rules in China as a ‘power movement’, which will push people to take one of China’s vaccinations.

Sarah Chan, a reader in bioethics at the University of Edinburgh’s College of Medicine, says if someone’s livelihood depends on travel to China for work, it could move him to take the vaccines, despite their lack of data. Scott Rosenstein, director of the global health program at Eurasia Group, said it could also put countries under pressure to authorize Chinese vaccines.

Some people have health conditions which means they are unable to take certain shots. “It’s simply not justified to let so much of what we do depend on whether we had a vaccine, let alone whether we had one specific version of the vaccine,” Chan said.

Despite China’s new visa rules encouraging travelers to take Chinese vaccines, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has rejected the idea of ​​’vaccine nationalism’.

What are the long-term effects?

China’s move comes as countries around the world tackle the broader demand to introduce so-called “immunity passports” to open international travel for people with coronavirus antibodies – either because they have recovered from it or through a vaccine.

But this leads to more questions – if an immunity passport gives special rights to people who have been vaccinated, what vaccines should be counted?

Another option is to have the 194 member states of the World Health Organization vote – the vaccines approved and recognized by most countries would set the standard, according to Thomas.

But a uniform vaccine passport for the world is far from over. For the time being, countries will probably only recognize the vaccines they have approved for use – and there are already signs that this is leading to silos.

“It’s this challenging challenge that I think will be interesting to look at,” Rosenstein said. “It will create a certain amount of tension and will increase this existing vaccination diplomacy tension.”

Rosenstein said people even prefer to take multiple vaccines so they can travel to other regions – a move that is unlikely to have negative health consequences, but which could harm the supply of vaccines.

What is the best way forward?

Chan sees a series of problems with immunity passports, especially high-tech digital people who have problems with data privacy. She also points out that once everyone has been given a chance to be vaccinated, vaccine passports can quickly become obsolete, meaning money can be better spent elsewhere.

A better approach would be to ensure that vaccines are available as widely as possible, she said. When a large part of the world population has been vaccinated, immigration authorities can use simpler approaches, such as asking the public to report themselves if they have had any vaccine. If some people lie, the population will generally still be small because most people have been vaccinated, she added.

Thomas also hopes for a best-case scenario where countries do not follow China’s lead – instead, they treat all vaccines the same, regardless of the vaccine, as long as the vaccine has the effectiveness of the vaccine. He hopes countries can stop treating vaccines as a race, and rather see it as a global health issue.

“The viruses do not care about borders, they do not care about nationalities or races or religions or ideologies or ethnicities or anything like that; they just want to repeat and mutate,” he said.

‘And I think, unless we take a real global approach to vaccines and realize that we simply have to do the best in the world, then we’ll look at latent pools of Covid popping up again in the future and possibly like the second wave of Spanish flu, which mutates so much that it makes it worse than before. ‘