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Hello and welcome to the Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by

Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Kate Andrews and Katie Balls. And the reason we're all here today is to

talk about vaccine diplomacy. I wrote about this recently for a cover piece for The Spectator, in which I looked at the Russian and Chinese

attempts to use the vaccines to further their soft power gains abroad. But now it looks like America

is also getting into the race and I wonder whether or not the UK and the EU should be doing

more as well. Kate, to start with, maybe you can just update us

on what the US has been doing on this front. So we found out in the last day that America is going

to jump into the vaccine diplomacy race, as you say, Cindy, and they're going to be giving out

four million doses to Canada and Mexico. Not a ton in the grand scheme of things, because that will

account for about two million people needing two doses each. But what's interesting is they're

going to give away the AstraZeneca vaccine. That has been approved in Canada and Mexico. It has not

been approved in the U.S. So I think they're very much playing on this idea that there's no point

in sitting on

these vaccines if Americans themselves are not using them, makes it slightly easier, politically

speaking, to give them away. But as James has pointed out in his Times column for Friday,

Canada has actually purchased more vaccines per resident in the country than I think any other

country in the world. And yet they have

very few because countries like the U.S. are holding on to them and they won't export them,

even when Canada's legally and legitimately bought them. So it's hard to say that the U.S. is being

particularly benevolent here because arguably Canada could have more vaccines if they were

operating on more of a level playing

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