In a reversal of its predecessor’s US-centric approach to addressing the coronavirus pandemic, President Biden is increasing the pressure on America’s wealthiest allies on Friday to obtain Vaccine for covid-19 doses in poor and developing countries. Biden told his fellow G7 leaders during a virtual summit that the United States would contribute up to $ 4 billion to COVAX, an initiative supported by the World Health Organization that aims to ensure equitable access to vaccines worldwide.
A senior government official said on Thursday that Biden’s announcement was intended, at least in part, to leverage US partners around the world to reinforce their own support for the initiative.
President Biden was pledging US $ 2 billion in advance to COVAX – which is US $ 2 billion more than the United States had offered under his predecessor – and another US $ 2 billion in the next two years, as long as other nations fulfill their obligations. commitments to the program. Officials said on Thursday that the money was earmarked by Congress in the December 2020 spending bill, so it would have no impact on domestic vaccination efforts in the U.S.
The senior official said the White House has recognized that ensuring health security around the world is also in the direct interest of the United States.
This is a point that global health experts have been emphasizing for months: if wealthy nations focus only on protecting their own populations from disease, it will be more than a moral failure – it will allow the mutation virus unchecked, and it could come back to haunt even in well-vaccinated countries.
Why worry about the world?
United Nations officials have repeatedly urged rich countries not to let the poorest defend themselves, and vaccine manufacturers not to base their vaccine distribution on profit margins.
In an article published earlier this month, Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, the UN agency created in response to the HIV / AIDS pandemic that hit the world in the 1980s, lamented “an apartheid vaccine that serves only interests of powerful and profitable pharmaceutical corporations, while costing each of us the quickest and least damaging exit route from this crisis. “
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had already punished vaccine manufacturers to target locations where “profits are highest”.
These arguments were largely for moral reasons, but Byanyima also warned that pandemic narcissism could put the populations of rich nations themselves – even if vaccinated – at risk of further outbreaks of COVID-19.
“The longer the virus can continue in a context of unequal immunity, the greater the chance of mutations that can make the vaccines we have and the vaccines that some people in rich countries have received, less effective or ineffective,” she said.
Byanyima also cited research carried out for the International Chamber of Commerce, which suggests that delaying poor countries’ access to vaccines will cost money, in the order of “about $ 9 trillion, with almost half absorbed in rich countries like the United States, Canada , Germany and the United Kingdom. “
Real-world evidence
As CBS News’ Debora Patta reported this week, there is already real-world evidence of risk to leave COVID-19 to spread and mutate in virus “reservoirs” around the world.
The South African government, facing a serious wave of infections and delaying for a number of reasons, only started its mass vaccination program a week ago. At that time, the now-known variant, first discovered in that country, had spread like wildfire across its cities. It has also been documented in dozens of other countries, including more than 150 cases in the United States.
Health experts said the variant, like the discovery in southern England, is much more easily transmitted between people, but vaccine studies have shown that South African variant it also appears to make current vaccines at least a little less effective.
Most pharmaceutical companies said that while they may need to add booster doses, their vaccines must still work well enough to prevent serious illness with all known variants.
The real risk is strains that we still don’t know about, or that may arise in the future in areas where vaccines are not launched efficiently.
“The virus is mutating, we will have more dangerous forms of this virus and we will run after it slowly as people die,” Byanyima told CBS News this week. “We need to move more quickly, increasing production and vaccinating the world as quickly as possible.”
Hope for “vaccine equality”
COVAX’s current goal is to distribute 2 billion doses of vaccines by the end of this year, fairly, to the countries most in need.
FABRICE COFFRINI / Getty
In a statement released on Friday, WHO Director-General Tedros noted new promises of support from the Biden government and other nations as a “growing movement behind vaccine equality”.
“I welcome the fact that world leaders are taking up the challenge by making new commitments to effectively end this pandemic, sharing doses and increasing funds for COVAX,” he said, adding that “to prevent variants of the virus undermine our health technologies and make it difficult for the global economic recovery to slow, it is essential that leaders continue to strive to ensure the end of this pandemic as soon as possible. “