United States of America eSeries: Reason to Doubt China's Vaccines?

Reason to Doubt China's Vaccines?

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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June 24, 2021

Reason to Doubt China's Vaccines?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has sent its vaccines far and wide. But those shots don't seem to be working as well as everyone would like, The New York Times' Sui-Lee Wee reports, as countries that accepted China's vaccine largesse are now experiencing some of the world's sharpest Covid-19 spikes.

"In the Seychelles, Chile, Bahrain and Mongolia, 50 to 68 percent of the populations have been fully inoculated, outpacing the United States, according to Our World in Data, a data tracking project," Wee writes. "All four ranked among the top 10 countries with the worst Covid outbreaks as recently as last week, according to data from The New York Times. And all four are mostly using shots made by two Chinese vaccine makers, Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech." (A Times map helpfully illustrates where Covid-19 is flaring up, globally.)

Domestically, China has administered more than a billion doses, according to its national health commission, and that success has spurred an encouraging global pace. (According to a recent Goldman Sachs prospectus, 25% of the world will have received at least a first Covid-19 vaccine dose by the end of June; that figure will reach 50% by the end of November, the bank expects.) But if China's shots are less effective than hoped—particularly against new variants—that's bad news for a slew of countries, as Beijing has distributed its vaccines in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

More Predictions for Raisi's Iran: Nuclear Rapprochement, 'Domestic Turmoil'

With the election of conservative judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi as Iran's next President, predictions for Iran's future have run the gamut. Perhaps most optimistically, Ali Vaez and Dina Esfandiary write for The New York Times that Raisi's presidency may increase the chances that Iran will compromise on its nuclear program by rejoining the 2015 pact and perhaps even by agreeing to a follow-on expansion sought by the current US administration. With a hardliner at the helm, they suggest, there would be less internal resistance to such big moves.

At Project Syndicate, Abbas Milani joins the skeptics, writing that Raisi's rise solidifies a divergence between Iranians and the regime, "which all but guarantees domestic turmoil in the coming months and years."

Apple Daily's Closure and the State of Hong Kong's Media

"Hong Kong is on the verge of losing its freedom of speech and freedom of the press," Nikkei Asia writes of the pending closure of newspaper and website Apple Daily after the arrest of top editors and executives under the national-security law Beijing implemented in Hong Kong last year. While "[t]he South China Morning Post, the territory's main English-language newspaper, still has leeway ... [j]ournalists in Hong Kong wonder how long it will remain possible to publish anything that is highly critical of the [Chinese Communist] party," The Economist writes.

It's the latest application of the national-security law to prompt an outcry. "That law, it is now abundantly clear, was a watershed moment that has utterly changed Hong Kong's political environment," the Financial Times editorial board writes. "Police have told local media they are analysing articles and opinion pieces published by the newspaper on suspicion that it has become a tool to endanger national security. This amounts to criminalisation of normal journalism and opinion-writing."

Why Are American Men Less Likely to Get Vaccinated?

Late last year, before vaccines arrived in force, Pew Research Center polling showed American men were more hesitant to get the shot than women, by 13 percentage points; now, after months of an aggressive vaccine rollout, men's vaccination rates lag women's by six percentage points in the US, per CDC statistics. At FiveThirtyEight, Angelica Puzio asks why men seem so reluctant to get inoculated.

Puzio floats theories that include men having less early access to vaccines, statistically (Americans older than 65 are more likely to be female); a looser relationship with preventative health care; a propensity toward conspiratorial thinking; and "traditional masculinity—the idea that men should be self-reliant, physically tough and emotionally stoic," which seems to harm men's health outcomes generally. ("The things that make you a successful, cool, tough man in America are also inversely related to health and longevity," Vanderbilt University Center for Medicine, Health, and Society Director Jonathan Metzl tells Puzio.) Though they're not directed at men explicitly, some current efforts could help, Puzio writes, noting that several states have said they'll offer "things like hunting and fishing licenses, free beer and even custom rifles to those who get the jab."