China’s vaccine diplomacy favors Cambodia’s top brass

How did Tea Banh receive a Covid-19 vaccination in late January? On February 10, the Cambodian defense minister admitted he had been vaccinated 20 days earlier, which puts the date of his inoculation on January 20 or 21.

This has raised eyebrows since the first tranche of donated Chinese Sinopharm vaccines only arrived in Cambodia on February 7, weeks after Tea Banh’s apparent inoculation. And Cambodia’s Ministry of Health only approved the Sinopharm vaccine on February 4. It also remains unclear whether other senior officials, including the all-powerful and possibly not all-seeing Prime Minister Hun Sen, knew about it.

Since January 17, Hun Sen had publicly said that he would be the first person to be vaccinated once the delivery from China was made, a way of showing that the jab was safe.

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