: Xi Jinping Pledges a Billion More Vaccines for Africa in the Wake of Omicron #WorldNEWS Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to supply another 1 billion doses of vaccines to African countries, as the

Xi Jinping Pledges a Billion More Vaccines for Africa in the Wake of Omicron #WorldNEWS
Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to supply another 1 billion doses of vaccines to African countries, as the world’s poorest continent grapples with the emergence of a new and potentially more transmissible Covid-19 variant.
Xi said 600 million doses will be donated while the rest will be jointly produced by Chinese enterprises and African countries, without providing details. He was speaking via video at the eighth triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in the Senegalese city of Diamniadio on Monday.
“We need to put people and their lives first, be guided by science, support waiving intellectual property rights on COVID-19 vaccines, and truly ensure the accessibility and affordability of vaccines in Africa to bridge the immunization gap,” Xi said in a speech.
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China has already sold 136 million vaccine doses to Africa and pledged 19 million in donations, according to the Beijing-based Bridge Consulting, which tallies deliveries through government press releases and news reports. Beijing has delivered 107 million of those doses, and another 11. 6 million through the Covax initiative, the consulting firm said Monday.
Beijing will offer African financial institutions a billion credit line and encourage its firms to invest at least billion in the continent in the next three years, Xi said. It will also provide billion in trade financing to support African exports to China rising to 0 billion over three years, and allocate billion of the country’s International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights — an international reserve asset — to African nations.
The two-day conference takes place as African countries are contending with the devastating fallout of the pandemic, which risks being exacerbated by the detection of the omicron strain. China as Africa’s biggest trade partner has an important role to play in the continent’s economic recovery.
“Xi Jinping’s keynote speech focused on the most immediate concern for the continent, namely the shortage of vaccines to combat the pandemic, especially in light of the new variant,” Lina Benabdallah, assistant professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University, said. His vaccines pledge was the biggest made so far to Africa, she added.
Since 2006, China had doubled its investment pledge to Africa every three years at the FOCAC summit, Beijing’s main vehicle for managing its relationship with the continent. That stopped in 2018 when Xi matched China’s previous pledge of billion, as the world’s second-largest economy came under fire for saddling developing countries with unsustainable levels of debt.

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