COVID-19 Vaccine Diplomacy: A Computational Multimodal Analysis of the Neighborhood Effect in Bangladesh's Vaccine Roll-out Response

Bangladesh started its COVID-19 mass vaccination program from February 2020. According to the COVAX live (Live COVID-19 Vaccination Tracker), as of May 2022, 70.26% of the total population have been vaccinated. This is indeed an example of Bangladesh governments' astounding competence that Bangladesh is considered among the first few countries to start vaccinations. However, Bangladesh did experience occasional hiccups in steady vaccine roll-out due to disruptions in the supply chain. Experts condemned Bangladesh's diplomatic choice of relying on only India as a steady vaccine manufacturing source after India decided to temporarily halt vaccinations right before the administration of second doses. Bearing reference to the 'Neighborhood Effect' in International Politics which implies that excessive dependency on geographical neighbors can cause similar levels of instability in both the countries (neighbors), this paper examines Bangladesh's overall Diplomatic approach in its COVID-19 Vaccination program with comparison to its East Asian counterpart Mongolia. Mongolia secured high-ranking position in COVID-19 mass vaccination using its strategic partnerships to pool vaccines from multiple sources as a result of its 2011 multi-pillars Foreign Policy (Third Neighborhood Policy) approach. Using a novel computational multimodal discourse analysis using machine learning assisted techniques in two large hand-collected datasets, the paper delves into the practices implemented by Bangladesh's multi-level stakeholders from the early stages of the pandemic until January this year to find any signs of or impacts of the Neighborhood Effect in its Vaccine Diplomacy. The paper later on makes policy-level suggestions on how to resolve this in case of future health crisis with occasional mention and comparison to Mongolia's Third Neighborhood approach and its implacability in Bangladeshi context.