The United States is under increasing pressure to share doses of the Covid-19 vaccine with less affluent nations, as advocates call for the prevention of an emerging “vaccine apartheid” and point to the strategic and diplomatic importance of sharing essential medicines.
Calls to share doses of the vaccine were higher this week after the Biden administration announced an additional purchase of 100 million doses of the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson. The US government has already purchased enough doses of vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson to vaccinate 500 million people – almost the entire eligible population twice.
The administration also holds the rights to 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The vaccine has not been authorized in the United States, but it is authorized for use in other parts of the world. AstraZeneca asked the United States to “give careful consideration” to vaccine donation elsewhere, a company spokesman said.
“I’m doing this because, in this wartime effort, we need maximum flexibility,” said Biden at a briefing at the White House announcing the purchase this week. “There is always a chance that we will encounter unexpected challenges.”
On Friday, Biden and the leaders of Japan, Australia and India – an informal working group known as Quad announced that they would work to increase manufacturing capacity, with the goal of sending 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines to countries islands in Asia and the Pacific by 2022.
But Biden government officials continued to resist sending doses of vaccines stored abroad, saying it is part of a plan to be “over-prepared and over-supplied” in the event that emerging variants of Covid-19 or decreased immunity require doses. reinforcement.
“We want to be part of the worldwide effort to vaccinate people in several countries,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki, citing the US $ 2 billion commitment to Covax, the global effort to share vaccines for covid19 .
However, she said that “the president’s first priority and focus is to ensure that the American people are vaccinated. And when we get to that point, we will have a discussion about what comes next ”.
The administration’s strategy is also a safeguard against any potential manufacturing disruptions and can provide a supply of vaccines for children, if and when clinical trials show that they are safe for use in children under 16.
The Biden administration plans to suspend all vaccine eligibility requirements by May 1 and expects to vaccinate all 267 million eligible Americans by the July 4 holiday. More than 530,000 Americans died after contracting the virus, a number the government often cites in defending its confidence in the vaccine’s launch.
“As I said before, I carry a card in my pocket with the number of Americans who have died from Covid so far,” said Biden in a prime-time speech on Thursday. “It’s late on my schedule. As of now, the total number of deaths in America: 527,726. There are more deaths than in the First World War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War and 9/11 together. “
However, countries like China and Russia have agreed to share vaccines to gain a strategic advantage. China’s vaccine makers have pledged half a billion doses to 45 countries, according to an Associated Press count.
“We can be defeated by others who are more willing to share, even if they do so for cynical reasons,” Ivo H Daalder, a former NATO ambassador and chairman of the Chicago Global Affairs Council, told New York Times. “I think countries will remember who was there for us when we need them.”
A recent World Bank analysis found that 82% of high-income countries started vaccination, compared with 3% of low-income countries. A January forecast from the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that middle-income countries are likely to vaccinate their populations en masse by the end of 2022, but 84 of the world’s poorest nations are unlikely to complete mass vaccination campaigns until at least 2024 and may never achieve collective immunity.
“This will define the global economy, the global political landscape, travel, almost everything,” said Agathe Demarais, the unit’s forecast director, at the time of the report’s release.
Proponents described the gap in access to vaccines between rich and poor countries as a potential “vaccine apartheid”. Many have also said failure to share vaccines threatens to repeat the failures of the HIV / AIDS epidemic.
“A me-first approach may serve short-term political interests, but it is self-destructive and will lead to a prolonged recovery, with trade and travel continuing to suffer,” wrote Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in the Guardian.
“The threat is clear: as long as the virus is spreading anywhere, it will have more opportunities to mutate and potentially undermine vaccine effectiveness anywhere. We can end up back to square one, ”he said.
Ghebreyesus is among the defenders who asked pharmaceutical companies to waive the intellectual property rights granted by the World Trade Organization. The hope is that the temporary waiver of patents would allow for widespread vaccine manufacturing.
The petition would give up certain rights guaranteed by the so-called TRIPS agreement. The matter is at the WTO, which is expected to debate the petition twice at its next meetings in April. The petition is widely supported by low-income countries and contested by high-income nations.
“We must be sure that in the end we will deliver,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the WTO. Thus, she said, “the millions of people who wait for us with their breath held know that we are working on concrete solutions”.