There is a strong case to be made that the Vietnamese government leveraged ingrained anti-Chinese sentiment to boost vaccine uptake.
There’s hardly any populace on Earth that is more anti-China than the Vietnamese. Several millennia of wars and border skirmishes, from a thousand years under Chinese rule to today’s disputes over the South China Sea, have ensured in Vietnam a deep distrust of its ideologically and culturally proximate neighbor.
This mistrust burst into the open recently when Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, became the beneficiary of a corporate “donation” of five million doses of Vero Cell vaccines produced by China National Pharmaceutical Group Corporation (Sinopharm).
TL;DR: So, it’s quite likely that the Sinopharm vaccine is just a foil for the often-underestimated AstraZeneca vaccine – an elaborate plan to boost vaccine rollout in Vietnam’s largest city and COVID-19 epicenter. Even if the Chinese vaccines might be included in the city’s future vaccination programs, Vietnam has achieved an important goal: nobody seems to make a fuss about blood clots anymore.
