Blinken: U.S. has deal to send J&J vaccine doses to conflict zones Zach Montague and Lara Jakes
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Wednesday the United States had negotiated a deal to ship additional doses of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine overseas, to help peo- ple living in conflict zones.
Speaking at a meeting with his overseas counterparts, Blinken stressed the need to extend vaccine access to people living in areas unreachable by government-run programs. The latest initiative is being carried out via Covax, the global vaccine-sharing program; Mr. Blinken did not specify a number of doses.
“We need to ensure that people who cannot be reached by government vaccination campaigns aren’t left out of our efforts,” Blinken said. “They need to be protected, too.”
President Biden has pledged more than a bil- lion vaccine doses to send abroad, but he has been under pressure to lean on pharmaceutical manufactur- ers, who have resisted sharing their technology with vaccine makers in lower-income countries.
Later on Wednesday, at the DealBook Online Summit, Blinken said: “When it comes to distribution, with all the different actors involved — governments, companies, international organizations — we have fallen short of the mark.”
Worldwide, about 75% of shots that have gone into arms have been administered in high- and upper-middle-in- come countries, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. Only 0.6% of doses have been administered in low-income countries.
During the meeting We d nesday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, appeared to call on the United States and other high-income countries to do more to help scale up global vaccine distribution.
Tedros said that at least 550 million additional doses would be needed to reach the organization’s goal of vaccinating 40% of the population of every country by the end of the year.
“We ask those countries that have promised to donate vaccines to make good on those promises,” he said.
Use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States has not been as high as that of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. Johnson & Johnson doses have also been distributed abroad through the Covax program in an effort to bolster immunity in poorer countries, including many in Africa.
Many of those have been provided through a similar deal reached in May, under which Johnson & Johnson agreed to sell about 200 million doses to Covax at a discounted rate.
Blinken also announced the launch of an online tracker to compile global data on vaccination and ICU rates with help from WHO.