China stepping up its vaccination programme is good for all of us

The path to freedom is getting those jabs put out to the world. China has switched its policy on fighting the virus from clamping down on people’s movements to getting as many as possible vaccinated – and that is leading forecasters to upgrade their expectations for growth.

Earlier this month China announced a plan to get 40 per cent of its people vaccinated by June. That’s half a billion. As a result, forecasts of its growth this year are being upgraded, with Oxford Economics now putting that at 9.3 per cent. That is massive and has an impact on the entire world, for China is now the world’s second-largest economy. The Oxford forecasters are ramping up their projections for other countries too, with India expected to grow by more than 11 per cent, the US by nearly 7 per cent and the UK by nearly 6 per cent. There are, they say, “grounds for cautious optimism”. 

There are two ways of looking at this. One is simply to acknowledge that the faster the vaccines are rolled out, the faster economies will recover. That is certainly true, and will be one of the features of this summer. The US and UK will follow this path, as Israel is already doing so.

But there is a second and more long-lasting effect. It will be that vaccination becomes the accepted norm for global movement. Quarantine, the crudest way of controlling transmission, will be abandoned. The world is nudging towards that point but there is an obvious reluctance, at least in the west, to make vaccination obligatory. So far the main area where it has become a requirement for travel is on cruise ships. Arguably they are a special case, partly because of the age and vulnerability of their main market and the fact that people are closely confined, but also because they are not an essential part of daily life. No one is actually compelled to go on a cruise. 

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Chinese social and health policies have not in general been an admired model for the west; rather the reverse. But the Chinese way of containing Covid-19, ever-tighter lockdowns, has become the de facto model across the developed world. Indeed, one of the main criticisms of the responses of other countries, including the UK, has been that they locked down too slowly. We have not, so-to-speak, been “sufficiently Chinese” in our approach. So as China switches to a mass vaccination policy, that will move policy elsewhere. 

This will not have a huge impact in the US, UK and Europe, all of which are vaccinating people as fast as they can. It will nudge us towards accepting vaccine passports or certificates of immunity as a normal requirement of entry into sports and cultural events. It may be that airlines, like cruise lines, will demand evidence of vaccination before allowing people to fly. But the really big influence that China’s switch of policy will have will be on the emerging world. If China can vaccinate so many people so swiftly, then other countries can do so too. It is powerfully in the self-interest of the west to help get those jabs out.

This puts a different perspective on the developed world’s current efforts to vaccinate the people in the emerging world. The G7 meeting last month urged swifter progress with the Covax scheme, but the slow pace of rollout has been widely criticised, among others by Oxfam. 

The plan for a global treaty to fight future pandemics is admirable but, meanwhile, we should welcome China’s vaccine rollout in helping to tackle this one. China’s switch of policy means not only that its own economy will grow more swiftly than it otherwise would have done. It also means that global production of vaccines will be ramped up to what would, even a few weeks ago, have seemed astonishing levels. This is a numbers game. From a global public health point of view, the efficacy of the different vaccines (assuming all are safe) is less important than the proportion of the world’s population that has some protection.

If China can indeed give jabs to half a billion people by June, that brings forward the date when the entire world will get protection too. This is a really important economic story about the pace of the global recovery, but it is a really important health and human story too.