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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud.

I'm Lara Prendergast.

Each week, we ask a few of our writers to read their piece from the magazine.

On today's episode, Cindy Yu explains how China and Russia are getting ahead in the great game of vaccine diplomacy.

Fraser Nelson tells us why the spectator went to court, and Josiah Goghetti asks how middle class is your dad?

First up, Cindy Yu.

At the end of January, the president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, gave a speech on the tarmac of San Diego Airport. Today is a day

of joy, excitement and hope, he said, standing in front of a Boeing 787, which had just arrived

from Beijing. Inside it were two million vaccine doses produced by the Chinese company Sinovac.

It was the first of two similar-sized shipments arriving that

month. A few days earlier, the President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, had emerged

from COVID confinement to thank a, quote, genuinely affectionate, end quote, Vladimir Putin,

for pledging 24 million Sputnik doses to Mexico in the coming months.

Hopes of vaccinating his country with the Pfizer vaccine had dissipated when supply dried up.

Pfizer blamed, quote, global shortages.

But here was the perfect opportunity for Putin to play the hero and to send the world a message.

In times of need, Moscow, not Washington, saves the day. This is vaccine diplomacy,

the new great game. Nations which are hungry to compete with the West and especially America

are using their homegrown coronavirus vaccines as a way of gaining influence. They are exchanging

...