Editorial | What Biden must hear on vaccines

Having made containing China’s growing global influence a key plank of his foreign policy, Joe Biden earlier this month urged America’s G7 partners to follow suit by offering investments to developing countries as a counterfoil to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Although it has not formally signed on to the BRI, Jamaica is one of the countries where the Americans would probably like to blunt the Chinese penetration.

Over the past dozen years, Beijing has loaned Jamaica hundreds of millions of dollars to build roads and bridges and sea defences, and its firms have invested in tolled highways, the sugar industry and the island’s major seaport. Chinese construction companies have also won major government and private-sector contracts.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, America’s diplomats regularly and openly harangued Kingston about what Washington perceived as a dangerous relationship. Mr Biden’s diplomacy is not built on such public lectures. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Jamaican officials get them anyway – in private.

Jamaica, however, shouldn’t have to ditch, or roll back, an obviously valuable partnership with China to maintain its long-standing relationship with the United States, or vice versa. But Mr Biden has an opportunity to demonstrate the store his administration places on that friendship, manifested, at this time, in how Jamaica benefits from America’s vaccine diplomacy.

Pummelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, Jamaica’s economy declined by more than 10 per cent in 2020. From that lower base, it is projected to grow about five per cent this year. Expansion of the tourism-dependent economy is being constrained by the island’s need to maintain measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Or put another way, a critical path to a return to sustained and robust economic activity is to achieve herd immunity against COVID-19 by vaccinating sufficient of the island’s 2.8 million people. For that to happen 70 per cent of Jamaicans need to be fully inoculated, which translates to more than 1.9 million people, or administering over 3.9 million doses of vaccines, depending on which of the vaccines is accessible.

So far, Jamaica has received 230,000 doses of the two-dose AstraZeneca, sufficient for eight per cent of the population to have a single shot of the drug, or half that amount if people were to be fully inoculated.

NONE FROM UNITED STATES

Notably, the vaccines that Jamaica has so far received have been a gift of 50,000 from India, or acquisitions under the World Health Organization’s COVAX Facility and from the African Medical Supplies Platform. None has come from the United States,whether via bilateral government-to-government arrangements or open-market purchases. In fact, Jamaica has been unable to buy vaccines on the private US market because of an absence of export approvals.

Mr Biden, however, has announced that Washington will, in short order, donate 80 million doses of vaccines to countries around the world. Fifty-five million of those doses, it was revealed on Monday, will go to Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. Fourteen million doses will be sent to this hemisphere, specifically Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, and other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries, Dominican Republic, Panama, and Costa Rica. Clearly, that allocation won’t go far.

To put it starkly, the 14 million vaccines now on the table are earmarked for countries with a combined population of 471.3 million people, or more than 71 per cent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean. With regard to CARICOM, the Biden administration has made a carve out for Haiti, which has a population of 11.4 million. But over seven million more people live in the rest of the community, of which Jamaica accounts for around 38 per cent.

NO CLARITY

The US also says that it will purchase and distribute another 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to 92 low and middle-income countries in the coming months. But there is no clarity on who will get what from this distribution, and critically – when. Neither are there details on the one billion doses that the G7 countries agreed at their summit earlier this month that they will donate to developing countries over the next year or so.

Jamaica and its partners in the Caribbean do not have time. Given how obvious the problem is, this is not a case that Jamaica should have to make. Nonetheless, the existential threat faced by the island, in the absence of vaccines, is an argument that Mr Biden needs to hear and which Jamaica must present to his administration. The region’s economic crisis cannot be resolved in the near term without access to vaccines. Indeed, increased availability of capital from the International Monetary Fund and other agencies is important, but will be of limited value if there are not sufficient healthy people in countries like ours to do the jobs.

A better solution to the vaccine crisis is to move beyond this doling out of the drugs by rich countries to the poor and middle-income ones. Production of the drugs have to be democratised. In this regard, initiatives to develop vaccine production hubs in developing countries, such as was launched in South Africa, is a move in the right direction. That must now be followed by the suspension by the World Trade Organization on its intellectual property rights regime for COVID-19 vaccines, which, unfortunately, G7 members could not bring themselves to do at their summit. That places a greater burden on Joe Biden to get vaccines to Jamaica and the Caribbean. We must tell him so.