In light of recent news regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine’s connections to blood clotting, Australia announced it would stop administering the shot to people under 50. They’ve also signed a contract to buy 20 million more doses of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine in its place, doubling their amount.
This poses a logistical nightmare for Australia: their plan had initially been to produce tens of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine by themselves, but manufacturing other shots will require some costly adjustments. This will cause time delays for Australia, but they still plan to ensure every person is immunized by this October to resume standard travel with other countries and return their economic activity to normal.
Pfizer acting in the place of AstraZeneca joins Australia with the United States, following a trend of open economic relations growing stronger. The US should be relieved at the opportunity to support one of our strongest allies following the vaccine nationalism we exercised earlier in the pandemic. Negotiating immunization sales so that our economy can once again be maximized by international commerce is a worthy goal for the US to undertake, so tha
t we can come out of the pandemic still holding strong ties to our historic allies.
Australia PM Scott Morrison, who delivered this report, has been criticized to be a weak leader lacking foresight and initiative; an unfortunate COVID response only adds to these, weighing down on him and his conservative coalition as another failure. If the conservatives fail to bolster his leadership before the next federal election in 2022, the labor party could hold Parliament. For foreign policy, this means a few steps away from a now unconditional relationship with the United States, while also taking more material rather than rhetorical action against China’s influence in the Pacific. Labor leadership has in the past expressed interest in maintaining Australia’s “Pacific pivot” to keep the South Pacific at the forefront of foreign policy, even stronger than the current conservative leadership; they strongly supported sharing their vaccine supply with their neighbor New Zealand and desire to join Indonesia in more bilateral agreements. This adds onto current PM Morrison’s $2bn infrastructure investments throughout the region.