Vaccine Diplomacy: An Interplay of Global Powers
Sam Thomas and Gazi Hassan The year 2020 will go down in history as the year where an invisible virus brought the world to its knees. It started off with Wuhan gaining international attention for spreading the COVID-19 pandemic, to banning international flights, lockdowns of cities and religious institutions and finally ending with the visuals of the American President and President-elect being vaccinated for the virus on live television. The discussions over the development of vaccine took precedence in the latter half of 2020 and so did the nuanced notion of vaccine diplomacy. The conferences on Health and Sanitation were already underway since the time Cholera and Yellow fever were first known to mankind. The Oslo Ministerial Declaration in 2007 was the year when global health became a part of foreign policy of various countries. Global health diplomacy has since then been categorised as core diplomacy , where negotiations between nations lead to treaties; a multi-stakeholder