U.S. sends 830K vaccine doses to Caribbean
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — The Biden administration Wednesday began shipping more than 830,000 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to six Caribbean nations as part of its commitment to help the fight against the global pandemic.
The vaccine donations come on the heels of the U.S. Southern Command’s assistance to the Caribbean as part of a COVID-19 response effort that has included desperately needed field hospitals for several Caribbean countries seeing peaks in virus cases, ventilators, personal protection equipment and oxygen generators.
Doral-based Southcom has more than 90 COVIDrelated projects in the Caribbean region alone, totaling more than $18 million, with more assistance to come, said Southern Command’s commanding officer, Adm. Craig Faller. Faller visited one of the donated COVID-19 field hospitals in Trinidad and Tobago before flying to Barbados as part of a three-day, two-nation Caribbean visit.
”Lives saved and the difference that this hospital has made, it strikes me as not a donation but it’s an investment. It’s an investment in our shared security because health security is national security,” Faller said standing inside the 28-bed facility in Port of Spain on Tuesday alongside Trinidad Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh. “It’s an investment in this hemisphere and our shared vision for a secured, free and prosperous hemisphere.”
In announcing the vaccine shipments Wednesday, the Biden administration said Trinidad will receive 305,370 doses while Barbados will receive 70,200 doses. Donations will also go to the Bahamas, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
After keeping the virus at bay last year, Caribbean nations have been struggling to control the spread.
They have faced a shortage of vaccines, and now the delta variant in the region poses a new threat.
In some countries, governments have turned to India and China for vaccine allocations, leading some to see vaccine diplomacy as an emerging problem in the region. The Biden administration has said that its donations have nothing to do with competition but ”to save lives and to lead the world in bringing an end to the pandemic.”
“We are sharing these doses not to secure favors or extract concessions,” a senior administration official said. “Our vaccines do not come with strings attached. We are doing this with the singular objective of saving lives.”
Alerted to a constrained supply chain for the specialized syringes required for the Pfizer vaccine, the U.S. government has also arranged for an initial start-up donation of ancillary kits.
In addition to the vaccines, which will arrive between now and the weekend in some countries — Tropical Storm Fred permitting — Southcom and the U.S. Agency for International Development are providing more than $28 million to help 14 Caribbean countries fight COVID-19 and address its impact, including $1.5 million to support vaccine distribution. Additional funding, including for vaccine distribution, is expected to be announced soon.
Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, the U.S. last month sent 500,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine to Haiti, the last country in the region to launch a vaccination campaign.