Vaccine and high-tech medicine, the new Chinese silk road is now sanitary

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06 December 2020 40 billion dollars in sales in the first year alone: ​​this is the figure that the market share of the anticovid vaccine disputed by Chinese pharmaceutical companies could amount to.

While the United Kingdom is the first country to have approved the immunizing drug developed by Pfizer and BioNTech (distribution will start on Tuesday, 800,000 doses are ready), and Russia is going forward with Sputnik V (effective for 95 % according to first clinical tests), China also announces that the vaccine for high-risk groups will be ready by the end of the year.

Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said this, although clinical tests are still underway and scholars have not yet provided any data on its effectiveness.

The vaccine produced by Sinopharm, which at the moment seems to be the most promising, has already been administered since July to hundreds of thousands of people most exposed such as medical personnel, military personnel, diplomats.

But Beijing's economic-health expansion policy is manifested above all through a more forward-looking design at the business level and in the reconquest of the Chinese image in the world, at the level of soft power.

Two tracks that run parallel in the inflexible political-economic planning of the Chinese government.

Harshly tested in the economy in the first phase of the spread of the virus, the Chinese locomotive has started to travel again, and now that it has overcome the epidemic it proceeds on its journey along the New Silk Road, a New "Health" Silk Road, reconverting most of the investments destined to the infrastructure of the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative), in medical devices and in high technology: just a few days ago the Asian Infrastructure Investmente Bank, the mega bank created to fill the infrastructural deficit of Asian countries, announced the creation of a department dedicated to Health and Education.

Premises that reveal how Beijing aims to become a protagonist in the health sector also in its digital declination: the high technological level reached by the People's Republic was decisive in overcoming the spread of the virus within the country and now proves to be precious for expansion global Chinese: telemedicine, e-commerce, e-learning and fintech could slowly replace major works with greater economic benefits and less waste of energy.

China's pharmaceutical market is the largest in Asia-Pacific, and has been growing steadily in recent years: according to a report released on August 31, 2020 by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Technology, the top 100 Chinese companies operating in the country have reached a total turnover of 140 billion dollars: a growth that has led the former celestial empire to be the second largest market in the world: not only but the economic relations built by Beijing with Africa, Southeast Asia and the 'Latin America for the BRI will be the routes on which vaccines will travel, basic medical devices starting with masks, but also the most advanced ones following the paths of global diplomacy.

Tortuous strategies that have also passed through relations with the WHO: where President Trump at the beginning of the epidemic cut the funds to the Organization accusing it of being pro-Chinese for having delayed spreading news about the virus, China has cleverly entered , providing substantial economic support and carving out a new space of influence.

"China helps to pave the way to restore the post-Covid world," Chinese President Xi Jinping said in recent days, stressing that unity and cooperation are the most powerful weapon to defeat the epidemic and encouraged the countries to overcome the divide by promoting unity, replacing prejudice with reason and putting together the greatest global synergy to defeat the virus.

Economy and soft power: in the face of a world in crisis and still sick - an example above all, 1800 infections in the USA in the last 24 hours - China, attacked by the rest of the world as a country at the origin of the virus, isolated, stigmatized, now it resumes its advance and proposes itself once again as a future global leader.