We need to help vaccinate the world from coronavirus

WASHINGTON » In the United States, despite worrying upticks in cases in some states, we’re well on the way to vaccinating ourselves out of the catastrophic domestic COVID-19 crisis. To get fully “back to normal,” though, we’re also going to have to — gulp — help vaccinate the rest of the world.

The Biden administration has so turbocharged the process of getting vaccines into arms that, recently, we’ve been administering as many as 3 million shots per day, and sometimes more. Although pockets of recalcitrance remain, demand for the vaccines still far outpaces point-of-delivery supply, and the number of Americans willing to get vaccinated continues to rise. Alleged reluctance among African Americans, for example, appears to be evaporating as access improves. According to President Joe Biden, by the end of May we will have obtained enough vaccine doses “for every adult in America.”

True, we should expect setbacks. It is maddening to see the images of huge spring-break crowds in Miami, jammed together with few participants wearing masks properly. Those young people are only helping the COVID-19 virus survive and potentially to mutate. But they are unlikely to become seriously ill if infected — and if they do take the virus home with them, at least there is a growing chance their parents and grandparents will already be immunized.

I keep thinking, though, about other crowds that were part of the old normal. I think of the masses of foreign tourists who gathered in the summer on the National Mall, waiting their turn to enter the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. I think about the crush of international visitors who used to fill midtown Manhattan at Christmas time, so thick you could barely walk down the sidewalk, laden with shopping bags from Fifth Avenue boutiques and chattering away in every language you’ve ever heard.

One of the languages I used to pick out most frequently in tourist crowds was Portuguese, spoken with various Brazilian accents. Before COVID-19, almost 2 million Brazilians visited the United States each year. But Brazil has seen more deaths from the virus than any country except the United States; anyone who has been in Brazil over the past 14 days is forbidden to enter the country.

We’ll never really get back to normal as long as international borders are essentially closed. And I don’t see how those borders can fully open until we can be sure that visitors are not bringing with them COVID-19 — perhaps in the form of variant strains that are more infectious, more deadly or more resistant to our vaccines.

Other nations face the same dilemma. Consider New Zealand, which has so completely eradicated COVID-19 that jampacked outdoor concerts can be held with nobody wearing masks. Why would authorities there risk admitting tourists from the United States, which is still seeing more than 50,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day? Even when we get that number down to 10,000 a day, as Anthony Fauci wants, how could New Zealand allow Americans in when the average of daily new cases there is less than one?

The thing is, though, that even the sturdiest walls erected against a virus will inevitably leak. A small island nation such as New Zealand can isolate itself more effectively than the vast United States, with its thousands of miles of land borders and coastlines. But no country can totally seal itself off from the outside world.

That is why Biden was right to take two important steps. Last week, the White House announced plans to send 4 million doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine — found effective against the virus, but not yet approved for use in the United States — to Mexico and Canada. The Biden administration has framed this as a “loan,” not a gift. But really it is a wise investment that will augment, at least incrementally, the lagging vaccination programs of our closest neighbors.

The administration has also announced it will donate $4 billion to the Covax Facility, an initiative spearheaded by Gavi, the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to try to ensure fair distribution of vaccines to poor countries as well as rich ones.

We need to do more. The Biden administration has arranged to acquire hundreds of millions more vaccine doses than are needed to inoculate the entire U.S. population, even including the teenagers and children who might be able to be vaccinated depending on the results of ongoing trials. We should liberally spread that wealth to other countries, handing out surplus vaccines like candy to poorer countries that need them — and that otherwise might not be able to carry out mass vaccination until next year or even 2023.

This is a crisis in which generosity and self-interest coincide. The plain truth is that we won’t get back to normal until everybody does.