Biden Wins, Vaccines Begin, Ethiopia Burns: A Pandemic Quarter That Changed the World’s Direction

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 January 2021 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2021

Quarterly Briefing

• Joe Biden wins the United States presidential election on November 3; Donald Trump refuses to concede and pursues legal challenges.
• Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna announce vaccine efficacy above 90 per cent in November; the UK begins vaccinations on December 8.
• Ethiopia’s civil war begins on November 4 as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed orders military operations against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
• COVID-19’s second wave crashes across Europe and North America; new lockdowns devastate the Caribbean’s winter tourism outlook.
• Nagorno-Karabakh: Azerbaijan and Armenia fight a six-week war; a Russia-brokered ceasefire on November 10 changes the region’s map.
• Jamaica’s tourism sector records its worst full year since the 1970s; remittances provide a critical economic lifeline.

Prologue: The Turn of a Terrible Year

The fourth quarter of 2020 arrived after a year that had already produced more disruption than most decades. COVID-19 had killed more than 1.5 million people globally by year’s end, shut down international travel, collapsed Caribbean tourism, and forced governments worldwide into deficit spending and emergency measures on a scale not seen since the Second World War. Against that backdrop, the quarter produced two developments that between them altered the trajectory of the crisis: an American election that would reshape global leadership on multilateralism, climate and pandemic response; and the announcement of vaccines with efficacy levels that exceeded even the most optimistic scientific projections. For Jamaica and the Caribbean, the quarter offered — for the first time since March — a genuine reason for hope alongside the continuing devastation of a second pandemic wave destroying the winter season that the region had desperately needed.

The US Election and Its Caribbean Consequences

On 3 November 2020, American voters delivered a decisive verdict: Joe Biden won the presidency with 306 Electoral College votes to Donald Trump’s 232, and with a popular vote margin of more than 7 million votes. The outcome was projected by all major US television networks on 7 November. President Trump refused to concede, instead directing his campaign to pursue legal challenges across several battleground states. The challenges failed: courts, including judges appointed by Trump himself, rejected them at every level. In mid-December, the Electoral College formally certified Biden’s victory. As January 3 arrives, Biden’s inauguration is seventeen days away and the transition is underway, though Trump continues to claim the election was stolen.

For Jamaica and the Caribbean, a Biden presidency carried specific significance. The Biden campaign had committed to rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office — a commitment that mattered enormously for Caribbean SIDS whose existential vulnerability to climate change had been worsened by the Trump administration’s withdrawal. Biden had also indicated a commitment to restoring multilateral engagement, to resuming normal diplomatic relations with Cuba and Venezuela within the bounds of US law, and to a Caribbean-specific development agenda. The broader reorientation of US foreign policy toward alliances and institutions was welcomed in Kingston and throughout the CARICOM capitals.

The Vaccines: Humanity’s Best News of 2020

On 9 November, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 had shown 90 per cent efficacy in Phase 3 clinical trials — a figure that surprised even the most optimistic scientists. A week later, Moderna announced comparable results for its own mRNA vaccine. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine followed with data showing efficacy of approximately 70-90 per cent depending on dosing schedule. On 8 December, the United Kingdom became the first country to begin mass vaccination, administering the Pfizer vaccine to a 90-year-old retired shopkeeper named Margaret Keenan in a moment broadcast around the world. The US FDA authorised the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use on December 11, and vaccinations began in American healthcare workers days later.

For the Caribbean, the vaccines were necessary but not yet available. The region’s access to early vaccine supply would depend on COVAX — the global equity mechanism established by Gavi, CEPI and the WHO — and on bilateral arrangements with manufacturers. Caribbean governments were negotiating for doses even as the first vaccinations were taking place in the UK and US. The practical consequence was a lag of months between the announcement that vaccines worked and the moment when Caribbean tourism workers and the general population would be protected enough to sustain a full reopening. The 2020–21 winter season was effectively lost.

Ethiopia’s Tigray War

On 4 November 2020, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had transformed Ethiopian-Eritrean relations through a historic peace agreement — ordered federal military operations against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the ruling party of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. The TPLF had been in a deteriorating conflict with the federal government over Tigray’s regional autonomy, elections and political power for months; the trigger for military action was a TPLF attack on federal military bases that the government described as mutiny. Within weeks, federal forces had taken Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, and declared military operations complete. The TPLF leadership went underground and resumed guerrilla operations from the mountains.

The Ethiopian conflict, while geographically distant from the Caribbean, was relevant to the region’s development context in several ways. It created a major humanitarian crisis at a time when global humanitarian funding was already severely strained by COVID-19; it destabilised a key African partner in Caribbean diplomatic relationships; and it raised questions about the durability of the post-Cold War African peace architecture that CARICOM had broadly supported. For energy and commodity markets, Ethiopia’s significance was modest in the near term. But the conflict’s potential to destabilise the wider Horn of Africa — a region sitting near critical Red Sea shipping lanes — was a longer-term consideration.

Nagorno-Karabakh: A Brief War Changes a Frozen Conflict

From 27 September to 10 November, Azerbaijan and Armenia fought a six-week war over the Nagorno-Karabakh territory, a region internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but administered by ethnic Armenians since a 1994 ceasefire. Azerbaijan, equipped with Turkish-supplied Bayraktar TB2 drones that proved devastatingly effective against Armenian armour and air defences, rapidly regained large swaths of territory lost in the 1990s. A Russia-brokered ceasefire on 10 November ended the fighting, with Armenia agreeing to withdraw from adjacent territories and Russian peacekeepers deploying to supervise the armistice. Azerbaijan declared a historic victory; Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan faced calls to resign.

The Nagorno-Karabakh war was relevant to Caribbean strategic analysis primarily because of what the Bayraktar drones demonstrated: that commercially available Turkish unmanned aerial vehicles could decisively transform the military balance in a regional conflict. This drone technology was already spreading: Turkey had exported Bayraktars to multiple countries, and their effectiveness in Libya, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh and beyond was reshaping military planning globally. For Caribbean security planners, the proliferation of low-cost precision strike capabilities to non-state actors and smaller states was a long-term concern.

Jamaica: The Worst Year for Tourism in Decades

Jamaica’s tourism sector recorded its worst year in decades in 2020. Stopover visitor arrivals fell by approximately 70 per cent from 2019 levels; cruise passenger arrivals collapsed almost entirely when the cruise industry suspended operations globally in March. The total economic loss from tourism — including direct spending, employment, foreign exchange earnings and linkages to agriculture, transport and hospitality supply chains — ran to billions of dollars. The government’s economic response included targeted support for tourism workers, expanded PATH social transfers and emergency spending that widened the fiscal deficit from the hard-won surpluses of the IMF programme era.

Remittances were Jamaica’s economic salvation through 2020. Contrary to the predictions of some analysts — who had expected US and UK diaspora income to collapse as pandemic-related unemployment spread — remittance flows to Jamaica held up strongly and in some months exceeded pre-pandemic levels. US government stimulus cheques, expanded unemployment benefits and the diaspora’s determination to support family members at home through an unprecedented crisis all contributed to flows that kept household consumption from collapsing as badly as the formal employment data suggested it should have. The housing and real estate market, while quieter than in 2019, retained activity from diaspora purchasing and from essential sector workers whose incomes were maintained.

Looking Ahead

As 2021 begins, the world is in its second COVID winter with vaccines approved but not yet widely distributed. Biden’s inauguration is imminent. The vaccines promise an end to the pandemic, but the timeline for Caribbean deployment means the winter 2020–21 season is essentially lost. The geopolitical environment — Ethiopia’s conflict, US political transition, Middle East tensions and a world economy struggling to recover from its deepest recession in generations — is complex. For Jamaica, 2021 will be the year that tests whether the vaccine-led recovery can actually arrive and whether the foundations laid by years of fiscal consolidation are strong enough to support a genuine economic renaissance. The hope is real. The path remains uncertain.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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