WASHINGTON – President Biden, under intense pressure to donate excess coronavirus vaccines to needy countries, set out on Friday to address the global shortage in a different way and work with Japan, India and Australia to increase global vaccine production capacity expand.
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 Biological E, a major vaccine manufacturer in India. helps to produce at least 1 billion doses of coronavirus. vaccines by the end of 2022.
It will address an acute shortage of vaccines in Southeast Asia and beyond, without risking the domestic political setback of dose delivery in the coming months as Americans scream for their shots.
The United States fell far behind China, India and Russia in the race to promote coronavirus vaccines as a tool of diplomacy. At the same time, Mr. Biden faced accusations of vaccinating global health advocates who want his government to channel supplies to needy countries desperate for access.
The president has so far refused to make concrete commitments to give away American-made vaccines, even though tens of millions of doses of the vaccine put by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca are idle in American manufacturing facilities.
“If we have a surplus, we will share it with the rest of the world,” he said. Biden said this week, adding: ‘We’re going to take care of Americans first, but we’re going to try to help the rest of the world first. ”
In fact, the president has put in a lot of work on his own to make the promises he has made in recent days come true: that by May 1, all states must consider all adults for vaccinations, that by the end, enough vaccine doses will exist. of May to vaccinate every American adult, and that life by July 4, when Americans continue to provide guidance on public health, will once again be a semblance of normalcy.
Vaccination provision seems to be on track to achieve these goals, but the president still needs to create the infrastructure to administer the doses and overcome the reluctance in large sectors of the population to take them.
Yet Mr. Biden also made the recovery of US leadership a focal point of his foreign policy agenda after his predecessor delayed alliances and strained relations with allies and global partners. His secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said in a recent BBC interview that a global vaccination campaign would be part of the effort; Washington said he was “determined” to be an “international leader” on vaccinations.
Foreign policy experts and global health activists see clear reasons for diplomatic, public health and humanitarian reasons for this.
“It’s time for American leaders to ask themselves: If this pandemic is over, do we want the world to remember that America’s leadership is distributing life – saving vaccines, or will we leave it to others?” says Tom Hart, North America’s executive director of the One Campaign, a non-profit organization founded by U2 singer Bono and dedicated to eradicating world poverty.
The federal government has bought 453 million excess vaccine doses, the group says. It called on the Biden government to divide 5 percent of the doses abroad when 20 percent of Americans were vaccinated, and to gradually increase the percentage of shared doses as more Americans received their vaccinations.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13.5 percent of people in the United States who are 18 years or older were fully vaccinated on Friday.
The authoritarian governments of China and Russia, which suffer less from domestic public opinion, are already using vaccines to expand their sphere of influence. While the Biden government is planning its strategy to counter China’s growing global influence, Beijing is burning its image by sending vaccines to dozens of countries on various continents, including in Africa, Latin America and especially in its Southeast Asian backyard. .
Russia has provided vaccines to Eastern European countries, including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, at a time when Biden officials want to unite the European Union against Russian influence on the continent.
“We may be better off than others who want to share more, even if they do so for cynical reasons,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former NATO ambassador and president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “I think countries will remember who was there for us when we needed it.”
With worrying and highly contagious new variants emerging in the United States and around the world, public health experts say that vaccinating people abroad is also necessary to protect Americans.
“It has to be sold to Americans as an essential strategy to make Americans safe in the long run, and it has to be sold to a very divided, toxic America,” said J. Stephen Morrison, a global health expert at the Centers for strategic and international studies. “I do not think it is impossible. I think Americans are beginning to understand that everything that happens outside our borders in the world of variants has the urgency to move fast. ”
Mr Blinken told the BBC just as much: “Until everyone in the world is vaccinated, no one is really safe.”
According to the White House, the Quad Vaccine Partnership announced at the summit on Friday has different commitments from each of the countries.
In addition to assistance to the Indian vaccine manufacturer, the United States has pledged at least $ 100 million to bolster vaccination abroad and help public health efforts. According to Japan, a ‘discussion’ is to give loans to the Indian government to expand the production of vaccines for export, and will help their 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 have a Expert group for four vaccinations top scientists and government officials who will try to address manufacturing barriers and financing plans.
Mr. Morrison said the government deserves some credit for the effort, adding: “It shows diplomatic ingenuity and speed.” A spokesman for the One Campaign, which focuses on extreme poverty, said his group still wanted to see a plan for vaccinating the United States and noted that Africa administered far fewer doses per capita than Asia.
Mr. Biden’s efforts to boost vaccine production have helped the United States produce as many as a billion doses by the end of the year – far more than is needed to vaccinate the approximately 260 million adults in the United States. .
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An agreement brokered by the administration to allow pharmaceutical giant Merck to manufacture the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which the president celebrated in the White House on Wednesday, will help advance the goal. Mr. Biden also instructed federal health officials on Wednesday to get an additional 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The administration said the efforts were aimed at having enough vaccine for children, increased doses to confront new variants and unforeseen events. But Jeffrey D. Zients, the 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 the pressure to give away excessive doses, Mr. Biden criticism of Liberal Democrats attracted by a request from India and South Africa to block a temporary waiver of an international intellectual property agreement that would give poorer countries easier access to generic versions. vaccinations and treatments against coronavirus.
“I understand why we need to prioritize our offer with Americans – it’s paid for by American taxpayers, President Biden is President of America,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a Liberal Democrat from California. “But there is no reason why we should 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 vaccination initiative supported by the World Health Organization. David Bryden, director of the Frontline Health Workers Coalition, a nonprofit aimed at supporting health workers in low- and middle-income countries, said money is also urgently needed to train and pay workers to get vaccines in to apply abroad.
But the donation, and Friday’s announcement of the Quad’s financial support for vaccine production, still does not live up to the urgent calls from public health advocates that the United States deliver immediate ready-to-use doses that can be injected quickly.
However, the Quad’s focus on Southeast Asia probably reflects an awareness of the gratitude towards China in the region, which has put Beijing in focus on the distribution of vaccines.
As mnr. Biden is widely regarded as helping the world recover from the coronavirus pandemic, it could become part of his legacy, as when President George W. Bush responded in the 2000s to the AIDS crisis in Africa with a large investment in public health funding. . More than a decade later, Mr. Bush and the United States across the continent are honoring the president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief, or Pepfar, which the government said spent $ 85 billion and saved 20 million lives.
Michael Gerson, a former White House speechwriter under Mr. Bush and a policy adviser who helped design the Pepfar program said its effect was moral and strategic, and that the program “brought the United States a tremendous amount of goodwill” in Africa.
“I think the principle here should be that the people who need it the most should get it, no matter where they live,” he said. “It does not make much moral sense to give a healthy American 24-year-old the vaccine in front of a frontline worker in Liberia.”
But, he added, “it is very difficult for an American politician to explain this.”
Ana Swanson contributed