WASHINGTON – President Biden, under intense pressure to donate excess coronavirus vaccines to underserved nations, acted on Friday to address the global scarcity in another way, partnering with Japan, India and Australia to expand global capacity vaccine manufacturing.
In an agreement announced at the so-called Quad Summit, a virtual meeting of leaders from the four countries, the Biden government pledged to provide financial support to help Biological E, a major vaccine manufacturer in India, produce at least 1 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines by the end of 2022.
This would resolve an acute shortage of vaccines in Southeast Asia and beyond, without the risk of an internal political reaction to the export of doses in the coming months, while Americans are clamoring for their vaccines.
The United States lagged far behind China, India and Russia in the race to organize coronavirus vaccines as an instrument of diplomacy. At the same time, Biden is facing accusations of accumulating vaccines from global health advocates, who want their government to channel supplies to underserved nations that are desperate for access.
Insisting that Americans come first, the president has so far refused to make any concrete commitments to distribute American vaccines, even with tens of millions of doses of the vaccine manufactured by the Swedish-British company AstraZeneca idle in American factories.
“If we have a surplus, we will share it with the rest of the world,” said Biden this week, adding, “We will start by ensuring that Americans are served first, but we will then try to help the rest of the world. “
In fact, the president has a lot of work ahead of him internally to keep his promises he has made in the last few days: that all states must make all adults eligible for vaccination by May 1, that there will be enough doses of vaccine by the end of May to inoculate all American adults, and that by July 4, if Americans continue to follow public health guidelines, life should return to an appearance of normalcy.
The supply of vaccines appears to be on track to meet these goals, but the president still needs to create the infrastructure to administer the doses and overcome the reluctance of large sectors of the population to take them.
Still, Biden also made restoring US leadership a centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda, after his predecessor eroded strained alliances and relationships with global allies and partners. His secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said in a recent interview with the BBC that a global vaccination campaign would be part of that effort; Washington, he said, was “determined” to be an “international leader” in vaccination.
Foreign policy experts and global health activists see clear diplomatic, public health and humanitarian reasons for doing so.
“It’s time for US leaders to ask themselves: when this pandemic is over, do we want the world to remember America’s leadership helping to distribute life-saving vaccines, or are we going to leave that to others?” said Tom Hart, the North American executive director of One Campaign, a nonprofit organization founded by U2 singer Bono and dedicated to eradicating poverty in the world.
The federal government bought 453 million doses of vaccine in excess, the group says. He urged the Biden government to share 5% of its doses abroad when 20% of Americans have been vaccinated, and to gradually increase the percentage of shared doses as more Americans receive their vaccines.
As of Friday, 13.5 percent of people in the United States aged 18 or older have been fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The authoritarian governments of China and Russia, less harassed by domestic public opinion, are already using vaccines to expand their spheres of influence. While the Biden government plans its strategy to curb China’s growing global influence, Beijing is polishing its image by sending vaccines to dozens of countries on several continents, including in Africa, Latin America and particularly in its backyard in Southeast Asia.
Russia has supplied vaccines to Eastern European countries, including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, at a time when the Biden authorities want to keep the European Union unified against Russian influence on the continent.
“We can be defeated by others who are more willing to share, even if they do so for cynical reasons,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former NATO ambassador and chairman of the Chicago Global Affairs Council. “I think countries will remember who was there for us when we need them.”
With worrying and highly infectious new variants emerging in the United States and around the world, public health experts say vaccinating people abroad is also necessary to protect Americans.
“It must be sold to Americans as an essential strategy to make them safe and protected in the long term, and it must be sold to a highly divided and toxic America,” said J. Stephen Morrison, global health expert at the Centers for Strategic Studies and International. “I don’t think that is impossible. I think Americans are beginning to understand that, in a world of variants, everything that happens outside our borders increases the urgency to act very quickly. “
Mr Blinken told the BBC this: “Until everyone in the world is vaccinated, no one is really completely safe.”
The Quad Vaccine Partnership announced at Friday’s summit involves different commitments from each of the nations, according to the White House.
In addition to assistance to the Indian vaccine manufacturer, the United States has pledged at least $ 100 million to increase vaccination capacity abroad and help public health efforts. Japan, he said, is “in discussions” to grant loans to the Indian government to expand vaccine manufacturing for export and will help with vaccination programs for developing countries. Australia will contribute $ 77 million to provide vaccines and delivery support with a focus on Southeast Asia.
The four countries will also form a Group of Experts on Quadruple Vaccines of key scientists and government officials who will work to resolve manufacturing obstacles and financing plans.
Morrison said the government deserves “some credit” for the effort, adding, “It shows diplomatic ingenuity and speed.” But a spokesman for One Campaign, which focuses on extreme poverty, said his group would still like to see a plan for the United States’ stockpile of vaccines and noted that Africa administered far fewer doses per capita than Asia.
Biden’s efforts to increase vaccine production helped put the United States on track to produce up to a billion doses by the end of the year – far more than needed to vaccinate the approximately 260 million adults in the United States.
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A deal the government brokered for pharmaceutical giant Merck to manufacture the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine, which the president signed at the White House on Wednesday, will help achieve that goal. Also on Wednesday, Biden instructed federal health officials to guarantee 100 million additional doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The administration said these efforts are aimed at having enough vaccine for children, booster doses to cope with new variants and unforeseen events. But Jeffrey D. Zients, Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters on Friday that the agreement between Johnson & Johnson and Merck would also “help expand capacity and ultimately benefit the world.”
In addition to resisting pressure to distribute excess doses, Biden drew criticism from liberal Democrats by blocking a request from India and South Africa for a temporary waiver of an international intellectual property agreement that would give poorer countries easier access to generic versions of vaccines and treatments for coronavirus.
“I understand why we should prioritize our supply to Americans – it was paid for by American taxpayers, President Biden is the president of America,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Liberal Democrat from California. “But there is no reason for us to prioritize the profits of pharmaceutical companies over the dignity of people in other countries.”
Mr. Biden recently announced a $ 4 billion donation to Covax, the international vaccine initiative supported by the World Health Organization. David Bryden, director of Frontline Health Workers Coalition, a non-profit organization that aims to support healthcare professionals in low- and middle-income countries, he said money was also desperately needed to help train and pay these workers to administer vaccines abroad.
But this donation, and the announcement on Friday of Quad financial support for vaccine production, still falls short of urgent calls from public health advocates for the United States to immediately provide ready-to-use doses that can be quickly injected.
The Quad’s focus on Southeast Asia, however, probably reflects an awareness of gratitude to China in the region, which Beijing has focused on its vaccine distribution efforts.
If Biden is widely seen as helping the world to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, it could become part of his legacy, as when President George W. Bush responded to the AIDS crisis in Africa in the 2000s with a huge investment of funds. public health. More than a decade later, Bush and the United States continue to be revered across much of the continent for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, which the government says has spent $ 85 billion and saved 20 million lives .
Michael Gerson, a former White House speechwriter during the Bush administration and a political adviser who helped design the Pepfar program, said that its effect was moral and strategic, and that the program won a tremendous amount for the United States. goodwill “in Africa.
“I think the principle here must be that the people who need it most should get it, no matter where they live,” he said. “It doesn’t make much moral sense to give the vaccine to a healthy 24-year-old American before a frontline worker in Liberia.”
But, he added, “this is very difficult for an American politician to explain”.
Ana Swanson contributed reports