In a reversal of its predecessor’s US-centered approach to the coronavirus pandemicPresident Biden increases pressure on America’s richest allies to get Friday Covid-19 vaccine doses in poor and developing countries. Mr. During a virtual summit, Biden told his fellow G7 leaders that the US would contribute up to $ 4 billion to COVAX, the World Health Organization’s initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to vaccines around the world.
A senior government official said Thursday that Biden’s announcement was aimed, at least in part, at leveraging U.S. partners around the world to bolster their own support for the initiative.
President Biden has previously dedicated $ 2 billion to COVAX – $ 2 billion more than the US offered under its predecessor – and then another $ 2 billion over the next two years, provided other nations meet their own commitments to the program. . Officials said on Thursday that the money had been earmarked by Congress in the spending bill for December 2020, and would therefore have no bearing on U.S. domestic vaccination efforts.
The senior official said the White House acknowledges that health security around the world is also in the direct interest of the US.
This is a point that global health experts have been emphasizing for months: if rich countries focus only on protecting their own people from the disease, it is more than a moral failure – it will virus to mutate unnoticed, and it may come back to haunt even countries that are well vaccinated.
Why worry about the world?
United Nations officials have repeatedly urged rich countries not to enforce poorer countries, and vaccine makers should not base their vaccine distribution on profit margins.
In an article published earlier this month, UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima declared the UN agency in response to the HIV / Aids pandemic that tore around the world in the 1980s, a vaccine apartheid that only serve the interests of powerful and profitable pharmaceutical companies, while each of us costs the fastest and least damaging exit from this crisis. ‘
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, already done castinated vaccine makers for targets in places where ‘profit is highest’.
These arguments were largely on moral grounds, but Byanyima also warned that pandemic narcissism endangers the wealthy people’s wealthy populations – even if vaccinated – for new COVID-19 outbreaks.
“The longer the virus is allowed to continue in a context of volatile immunity, the less effective or ineffective the mutations that the vaccines we have, and the vaccines some people have already received in rich countries, are. can make, “she said.
Byanyima also cited research conducted for the International Chamber of Commerce, which suggests that delaying poor countries’ access to vaccines would cost an estimated $ 9 billion, with almost half of them absorbed in affluent countries such as the United States. , Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom. “
Real world evidence
As Debora Patta of CBS News reported this week, there are already actual evidence of the risks of COVID-19 to spread and mutate the virus reservoirs around the world.
The government of South Africa, which is facing a serious wave of infections and has been delayed for various reasons, only started its mass vaccination program a week ago. By that time, the now-famous variant first discovered in that country had spread like wildfire through its cities. It has also been documented in dozens of other countries, including more than 150 cases in the United States.
Health experts have said that the variant, such as that discovered in the south of England, can be transmitted much more easily between humans, but vaccination studies have shown that South African variant It also appears that the current vaccines are at least somewhat less effective.
Most pharmaceutical companies have said that while they may need to add booster shots, their vaccinations should still work well enough to prevent serious illnesses with all the known variants.
The real risk is the strains we do not yet know about, or which may occur in the future in areas where vaccines are not being rolled out effectively.
“The virus is mutating, we are going to get more dangerous forms of this virus and we will slowly run after it if people die,” Byanyima told CBS News this week. “We need to move faster by increasing production and vaccinating the world as quickly as possible.”
Hope for “vaccine equality”
The current goal of COVAX is to get 2 billion vaccine doses fair to the countries most in need by the end of this year.
STOF COFFRINI / Getty
In a statement released on Friday, WHO Director-General Tedros noted the new promises of support from the Biden government and other countries as a “growing movement behind the vaccine.”
“I welcome the challenge that world leaders are taking on new commitments to effectively end this pandemic by sharing doses and increasing funds for COVAX,” he said, adding: “to prevent virus variants from undermining our health technologies and a ‘already slow global economic recovery, it is critical that leaders take action to ensure that we end this pandemic as soon as possible.’