Vaccine donations, diplomatic leverage and confused aid policy

Boris Johnson has pledged to give excess supplies of the vaccine to poorer states, but rich countries have been accused of hoarding. Photograph: Geoff Caddick/AP

So our government is going to donate the UK’s surplus doses of vaccine to poorer countries (Please insert web xrefBoris Johnson to pledge surplus Covid vaccine to poorer countries at G7, 18 February). Surplus? So, once the rich countries have had their fill? Good to know the spirit of empire lives on.
Jeanette Hamilton
Buxton, Derbyshire

• The British government, according to Foreign Office minister James Cleverly, is not going to use its excess supplies of Covid-19 vaccine, “as some form of diplomatic leverage”. But abolishing DfID was, according to the prime minister, to “put the tackling of poverty and deprivation at the heart of foreign policy”; diplomatic leverage, not humanitarian assistance. Since then, cuts announced in the foreign aid budget, the former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell says, are likely to cause 100,000 otherwise preventable deaths. We learn, then, that this government’s new foreign policy is to stop people dying from Covid‑19 so that they can die of poverty instead. Or is this more policy confusion? Or, simply, hypocrisy?
Robert Walker
Institute of social management/school of sociology, Beijing Normal University