BIDEN: ‘GO BIG’
Joe doubles vax gifts, adds 500M doses for poor nations
President Biden on Wednesday almost doubled America’s commitment to donate COVID-19 vaccines to the rest of the world, saying that the U.S. is buying an additional 500 million doses to ship to poor and middle-income nations.
The pledge to purchase the Pfizer shots brought America’s cumulative planned contribution to 1.1 billion doses, and represented a centerpiece in Biden’s push to get wealthy nations to do more to put a lid on the painful 18-month-old pandemic.
“For every one shot we’ve administered to date in America, we have now committed to do three shots to the rest of the world,” the president said from Washington in a virtual coronavirus summit. “We need other high-income countries to deliver on their own ambitious vaccine donations and pledges.”
America, flush with vaccines for its own citizens, has been criticized for moving too slowly to distribute doses to less fortunate countries. On Wednesday, Biden promised that the U.S. will become the “arsenal of vaccines as we were the arsenal of democracy during World War Two.”
He said the additional 500 million doses would ship out in the next 12 months.
He is embracing the goal of inoculating 70% of the world’s population within a year, a daunting task given the sluggish pace worldwide, especially in poorer places.
An estimated 43% of the global population was vaccinated over the last year. But there are vast disparities in distribution, with some nations stuck at rock-bottom immunization rates around 2%.
Health experts say the developing world needs far more than 1 billion shots.
“We will need 6 to 9 billion doses of vaccines” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, according to Reuters.
To date, the U.S. has doled out about 160 million shots to 100 countries, Biden said, more than the rest of the planet’s countries combined. At the same time, the president has pushed for booster shots for Americans, a controversial step.
The World Health Organization and other international aid groups say that fully inoculated Americans should not receive booster shots before poor and vulnerable populations in developing nations receive the first dose. As of last week, less than 4% of Africa’s population had been fully immunized, according to the WHO.
The dismaying disparity has led to charges that the U.S. and other rich nations are hoarding shots. And experts have underscored the risks to all countries, wealthy or not, posed by unequal deployment of vaccines.
“The staggering inequity and severe lag in shipments of vaccines threatens to turn areas in Africa with low vaccination rates into breeding grounds for vaccine-resistant variants,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, said in a recent statement. “This could end up sending the whole world back to square one.”
To combat the challenge, Biden said the U.S. is working with manufacturers to improve vaccine production in other countries. He said America is sending aid to boost manufacturing in South Africa, with a goal of pumping out more than 500 million doses of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson coronavirus inoculation for Africans.
“We also know from experience that getting those vaccines into people’s arms may be the hardest logistical challenge we’ve faced,” Biden said. “That’s why we need to significantly step up our investment in helping countries get shots in arms.”
The U.S. will put an extra $370 million toward administration and delivery of the shots worldwide, the president promised. He urged other countries to avoid selling vaccines to low-income countries, and to offer the doses without political obligations attached.
Along with the American assurances, the European Union slightly bumped its donation commitment, increasing it to 500 million doses.
“We call for nations that are able to vaccinate their populations to double their dose-sharing commitments or to make meaningful contributions to vaccine readiness,” the European Commission said in a statement.
COVID has killed more than 4.5 million people globally, and Biden said the virus remains humanity’s single most pressing challenge. “Nothing is more urgent,” he said in the summit. “We’re not going to solve this crisis with half measures or middle-ofthe-road ambitions. We need to go big.”