Letters | Covid vaccine passports: why China needs to look beyond the US
- China may wish to be the leader in promoting the vaccine passport system, but the US is opposed to the Chinese, as usual
There is no doubt that Covid-19 is destroying the economies of most countries. Not even nations as strong as the United States or China can escape from it. With the emergence of vaccines, it seems there is finally a way out for us. But the reality is that it is not yet time.
To restart travel, the first step is to introduce a system for recognising vaccines: the vaccine passport is one possible protocol. But here, the toughest puzzle to crack is mutual vaccine recognition.
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China relaxes visa rules for foreigners inoculated with Chinese-made vaccines
It is of note that China is the only major economy that managed to post growth in the past year, despite the pandemic. Regardless of the reliability of the economic data, China’s urgency to recover foreign trade, travel, education and other sectors is not as serious as that of a lot of countries. As China still has a good trading relationship with Germany, its primary Western partner in economic cooperation may not really need to be the US. On the other hand, the pandemic has shown just how deteriorating China ties are affecting the US economy in different ways.