Modi Never Bought Enough COVID-19 Vaccines for India. Now the Whole World Is Paying
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is on a thankless mission. For the Indian external affairs minister, the official trip to the U.S. this week—the first by a senior Indian minister since President Joe Biden took office—is awkwardly timed, coming as it does on the heels of a dust-up between the Indian government and American social media platforms Twitter and WhatsApp. As if his core task on the trip—procuring COVID-19 vaccines for India—wasn’t challenging enough.
India continues to reel from a severe coronavirus outbreak, with more than 200,000 reported cases and 4,000 deaths recorded each day—a tragedy made worse by an acute vaccine shortage. Jaishankar is tasked with meeting top U.S. officials and vaccine manufacturers to secure supply deals. Biden has agreed to ship 80 million doses of vaccine to needy countries, and India hopes to land as many of those as it can. It needs vaccine desperately; vaccination numbers for May dropped by half from April. More than 1 million Indians are estimated to have died in the pandemic (the official death toll is 315,000, which most experts agree is grossly understated.)
India has come a long way in a short time—from the swaggering Vaccine Guru boasting about saving the world, to desperately scouring the globe for vaccines. For the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer, it’s not easy to go hat-in-hand asking for vaccines, and India’s foreign minister, suave and well-spoken, is trying to keep it classy.
He is making pious noises. Countries must look beyond their “national interests” for “global good,” he said at a Hoover Institution engagement. Funny he should mention that, because it’s India’s vaccine nationalism—along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s empty showboating—that not only plunged India into an unexpected vaccine shortage, but also put countries banking on vaccines from India at great risk.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/india-never-bought-enough-covid-104432756.html
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