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How Mongolia’s Covid vaccination drive surged ahead of West – despite remote population and poverty www.inews.co.uk
As countries race to vaccinate their populations against the coronavirus, one remote region has emerged as a surprise success story when it comes to getting shots in arms: Mongolia.
Although Mongolia is the world’s most sparsely populated country with a large nomadic community, it has overcome geography and other factors to surge ahead of most of the West.
By Tuesday, Mongolia’s statistics showed 61.1 per cent of its 3.3 million citizens had been fully vaccinated, less than 1 per cent shy of its entire adult population. That is more than Britain (56.7 per cent according to figures from Our World In Data), Belgium (58.9 per cent) and Canada (59.5 per cent). Only a handful of countries such as Israel (62.2 per cent), Chile (64.5 per cent), and United Arab Emirates (70.7 per cent) are ahead.
The main reason for landlocked Mongolia’s impressive vaccination rate is canny diplomacy. Early this year, the government readily took up offers of cheap vaccines from the two powerful countries that sandwich Mongolia to the north and south, Russia and China.
While many other countries were sceptical about China’s Sinopharm and Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines, Mongolia’s government was happy to accept. Had Mongolia waited, like other low-income countries, for vaccines from the global Covax initiative, it would be well into 2022 or beyond before it reached the current level.
A country of rugged steppes, mountains, forests and the Gobi Desert, Mongolia prides itself on the warrior spirit of its ancient leaders such as Genghis Khan. But it has a population of just one-third of London’s spread across a territory the size of France, Spain and Germany.
It took shrewd, strategic manoeuvring to ensure both Beijing and Moscow would shower Mongolia with doses at an early stage. Mongolia is effectively a buffer state between the two nuclear giants and has experience in playing its neighbours off against one another.
This was crucial in February when the government’s much-publicised purchase of one million doses of Sputnik V prompted China to jump in and offer 4.5 million doses of Sinopharm. There were also vaccine donations from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and from the Indian government.
Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College in London says the vaccine success reflects Mongolia’s astute reading of the political landscape – and the risks of infections from China.
“Mongolians have long, long experience of dealing with China,” he says. “While they preserve good relations with their huge and powerful neighbour, they are not naive, and are very keen to protect themselves. Vaccination makes absolute sense because there is a high awareness that the situation in terms of the pandemic in China may well be worse than publicly stated, and there is no space to take things on trust.”
Despite its vaccine success, Mongolia has been unable to prevent a surge in infections this summer. But the recent spike rises from a low base: after the pandemic was first declared, Mongolia went 10 months with no local transmission of the virus. The country now stands at over 167,000 total cases and 827 deaths – although officials say 96 per cent of fatalities are among people who are not vaccinated at all or have just had one dose.
Published Date:2021-08-04
