U.S. vaccine donations for ‘range’ of countries

WASHINGTON — The White House, besieged with requests from other nations to share its supply of coronavirus vaccine, announced Thursday it would distribute an initial 25 million doses this month across a “wide range of countries” in Latin America and the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, as well as the Palestinian territories, war-ravaged Gaza and the West Bank.

The doses are the first of a total 80 million that President Joe Biden has pledged to send overseas by the end of this month. Three-quarters of the initial batch will be given to the international vaccine effort known as COVAX, officials said at a White House briefing on the pandemic, though administration officials are helping decide where to send them.

The rest will be reserved for “immediate needs and to help with surges around the world” and regions dealing with “urgent, present crises,” said Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, including in India, Ukraine and Iraq as well as the West Bank and Gaza.

But the donation is nowhere close to enough. About 11 billion doses are needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population against the coronavirus, according to estimates from researchers at Duke University. As of last month, the analytics firm Airfinity estimated that 1.7 billion doses had been produced.

Thursday’s announcement comes a week before Biden leaves for Cornwall, England, to meet with the heads of state of the Group of 7 industrialized nations, where the global vaccine supply is certain to be a topic of discussion. Officials said the Biden administration would donate additional doses throughout the summer as they become available.

“This is just the beginning,” said Jeffrey Zients, Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator. “Expect a regular cadence of shipments around the world, across the next several weeks.”

While China and Russia have used vaccine donations as an instrument of diplomacy in an effort to extract favors from other nations, Biden has insisted the United States will not do that — a point that Sullivan emphasized Thursday in describing the White House strategy.