CORONAVIRUS
The U.S. will buy 500M vaccine doses to give to poorer countries.
The White House has reached an agreement with Pfizer and BioNTech to provide 500 million doses of coronavirus vaccine to about 100 countries over the next year, a pact that President Joe Biden plans to announce as early as Thursday, according to multiple people familiar with the plan.
Under intense pressure to do more to address the global vaccine shortage and the disparities in vaccination between rich and poor nations, the president hinted at the plan Wednesday morning when he was asked if he had a vaccination strategy for the world.
“I have one, and I’ll be announcing it,” Biden said before he boarded Air Force One for his first trip abroad as president. He was headed first to Cornwall, England, to meet with leaders of the Group of Seven nations.
People familiar with the deal said the United States will pay for the doses at a “not-for-profit” price. The first 200 million doses would be distributed this year, and 300 million would be distributed by the middle of next year, they said.
Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, is expected to appear with the president when Biden makes his announcement.
The United States already has contracted to buy 300 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which requires two shots. The new agreement is separate from those contracts, according to one person familiar with it, bringing to 800 million the total number of doses the United States has agreed to buy.
White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeffrey Zients said in a statement Wednesday that the president would use the “momentum” of the U.S. inoculation campaign “to rally the world’s democracies around solving this crisis globally, with America leading the way to create the arsenal of vaccines that will be critical in our global fight against COVID-19.”
The 500 million doses, all of which will be produced in the United States, still fall far short of the 11 billion doses the World Health Organization estimates are needed to vaccinate the world, but significantly exceed what the United States has committed to share so far. Other nations have been pleading with the United States to give up some of its abundant vaccine supplies.
Activists have insisted that the effort isn’t nearly enough. They’re calling on the Biden administration and leaders of other developed nations to go beyond sharing surplus doses by laying out a plan to ramp up manufacturing overseas and pushing for vaccine makers to transfer their technology to other nations.
Biden already has committed to supporting a waiver of an international intellectual property agreement, which would require vaccine makers to share their technology. But European leaders are still blocking the proposed waiver, and pharmaceutical companies are strongly opposed to it. The World Trade Organization’s Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is meeting this week to consider the waiver.
“The truth is that world leaders have been kicking the can down the road for months — to the point where they have run out of road,” Edwin Ikhouria, executive director for Africa at the ONE Campaign, a nonprofit aimed at eradicating global poverty, said in a statement Wednesday.
“This is the moment to do whatever it takes to beat the virus everywhere,” he said, “starting by immediately sharing their surplus doses, fully funding the global initiatives set up to distribute COVID vaccines” and coming up with an economically viable strategy to distribute them to countries in need.
Biden’s announcement comes after the United States has at least partly vaccinated 52 percent of its population. But as the pace of vaccination has dropped sharply since mid-April, the Biden administration has pursued a strategy of greater accessibility and incentives to reach Americans who haven’t gotten shots.
Despite those efforts, unused vaccine doses could go to waste. Once thawed, doses have a limited shelf life, and millions could begin expiring within two weeks, according to federal officials.