Why U.S. should prioritize vaccinating the world

In 1948, Europe lay in ruins, entire cities laid waste by the destruction of World War II. Even though many of the countries in Western Europe were our erstwhile enemies, the United States recognized the necessity of rebuilding the continent and so enacted the Marshall Plan.

We eventually lavished more than $78 billion (in today’s terms) on the continent, rebuilding vital infrastructure, reviving their economy and very possibly preventing whatever internecine struggles could have resulted from the poverty that likely otherwise would have ensued.

In 2003, the United States recognized that much of the world was still languishing without lifesaving HIV/AIDS medications.

Nowhere was this truer than in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV, tuberculosis and poverty made for a particularly deadly mix.

Compelled by our collective moral conscience, the United States launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has since provided more than $80 billion toward research, infrastructure construction and treatment dissemination directed toward the eventual eradication of HIV/AIDS, especially in the developing world.

These and other similar initiatives remind us that the United States most fully lives up to it moral mission — and shines most brightly — when it sallies forth in peace to protect the vulnerable and to provide for other nations in times of need.

The time has now arrived for another such moral mission.

President Joe Biden announced a few weeks ago that he expects to offer vaccines to every U.S. adult by early summer. We can rightly celebrate this achievement as a triumph of science, logistical know-how and human ingenuity.

But we must recognize that this is the beginning, not the end.

I call on Biden to turn the full industrial, economic, pharmacologic and medical might of the United States to vaccinating the world against COVID-19 — including by leveraging patents under our control to ensure pharmaceutical companies make enough vaccines to inoculate the world and then make them available to countries who cannot access them otherwise

This should not be a halfhearted effort. We should treat this as on par with a war that ravages the world and in which we must engage with all our might.

The reasons we must do this abound. The more quickly the world is vaccinated, the fewer more dangerous variants will evolve, and the less likely our vaccinations will be rendered useless. The faster we achieve worldwide vaccination, the more quickly we will return to a thriving global economy. The U.S. push to vaccinate the world will also reestablish us as a world leader in the foreign affairs that matter most; if we don’t lead out on this, Russia and China, whose strategic rivalries with the United States grow increasingly complex and fraught, will be happy to fill the void.

But the most important reason is not any of these. The most important reason is the creed that unites us as U.S. citizens: our bedrock belief that all people really are created equal.

In this season of reckoning with historical and present-day racism, and of seeking reconciliation of our past wrongs, how can we ignore the suffering that will surely ensue should other countries be left without lifesaving vaccines? We must see that ignoring sickness and death in other nations threatens the integrity of that very reckoning. If our industrial and economic might is to remain morally meaningful, we must use it to vaccinate the world.

Our collective moral conscience compels us.