(CNN) – China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced Wednesday a $1 billion loan to Latin America and the Caribbean to access the COVID-19 vaccine in a virtual assembly with its Latin American counterparts, according to a statement issued by Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“China’s foreign minister has declared that the vaccine developed in his country will be a universally accessible public benefit, and that his country will provide a $1 billion loan to help access [the vaccine] of nations in the region,” he said. he told me.
In a daily briefing on Thursday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador thanked China after the loan was announced.
“We are very grateful to China, to the Chinese government, the president – you had the possibility to contact him by phone – we asked him for help with medical equipment, there were many aid flights from China.”
“There’s been enough equipment, enough medicine, and now there’s this offer,” he added.
Wednesday’s virtual assembly was led by Mexican Chancellor Marcelo Ebrard and Wang Yi. His peers from Argentina, Barbados, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay also joined.
Prior to the meeting, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in his daily report that the pandemic, “China and the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, although the oceans are separated, joined this unusual enemy and carried out practical and effective cooperation to their advantage. of all our people. »
He said the assembly would “consolidate consensus between the two sides on the joint fight opposed to the pandemic, strengthen mutual political trust, multilateralism” and build a shared long-term network for the regions.
Latin America has become the epicenter of the global pandemic last May. A CNN knowledge investigation from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) last week revealed that Latin America and the Caribbean had suffered more coronavirus deaths than the United States and Canada; the latter still reported more capital-consistent deaths.
Brazil has the highest number of cases in the world, after the United States, with more than 2.2 million people infected, according to JHU figures. Chinese biotechnology company Sinovac has started a Phase 3 vaccine trial in the country, along with a Phase 3 trial through Oxford University and pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.
Peru, Chile and Mexico are also among the ten countries most sensitive to the cases shown, while the virus is also spreading in Venezuela, where considerations have been raised about the country’s paralyzed fitness system.
Government responses to the virus have differed dramatically in Latin America, however, the region’s degrees of casual and higher inequality are among the points driving the expansion of the epidemic.
The coronavirus has also deepened the hole between the United States and China, with Trump’s management attacking China for its early reaction to the virus.
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