The move comes as the US struggles with its own shortages.
President Joe Biden plans to announce Friday that the United States will contribute $ 2 billion to a UN-backed program that seeks to distribute COVID-19 vaccine doses to people in the poorest countries in the world, according to senior Biden administration officials .
Congress had already allocated the money in December to the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide Gavi, an international alliance on vaccine distribution. Congress has provided a total of $ 4 billion and officials have said the US will give the rest to Gavi during the course of this year and 2022.
The move, which the White House said Biden plans to announce during a virtual meeting of the group of seven leaders, comes as the United States struggles with insufficient doses to vaccinate its own population, although the situation in poorer countries is much worse. .
To date, ten countries have administered 75% of all COVID-19 vaccines, while more than 130 countries have not received a single dose, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
Many countries cannot compete with affluent ones like the US to purchase the limited quantities of vaccine doses from manufacturers. In collaboration with the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations Foundation, Gavi runs a global vaccination initiative called COVAX that aims to address the difference by distributing doses more fairly.
Although then-President Donald Trump signed a December bill that allocated the $ 4 billion to Gavi, he had earlier refused to support COVAX, and his government also made a commitment to the World Health Organization.
Biden dramatically reversed the approach and kept the US in the WHO, making the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic a national security priority worldwide.
But ending the global outbreak is complicated with limited availability of vaccine doses.
The United States has so far purchased 600 million vaccine doses, but it does not intend to give any of them to other countries until – as Biden ordered in a January 21 memorandum – “there is sufficient stock in the United States. not.”
A senior administration official said Thursday that ‘this promise to COVAX does not affect the vaccination program in the United States at all. ‘
“Although we are unable to share the doses of vaccines at this time, while we are focused on US vaccinations and getting shots in the arms,” the official said, “we are working hard to get COVAX support, strengthen global vaccination around the world and determine the timeline for when we will have sufficient supplies in the United States and be able to donate excess vaccines. ‘
Meanwhile, China and Russia have donated doses of their homemade COVID-19 vaccines to partners and developing countries as a form of ‘vaccine diplomacy’. The United States has not yet followed suit.
Administrative officials have argued that vaccinating people abroad protects the health of Americans domestically.
“Reducing the burden of disease reduces the risk to everyone in the world, including Americans,” the official said. “It also reduces the risk of variants occurring, such as those we see now. It is therefore critical to increase vaccination worldwide, while of course we prioritize vaccinations here at home.”
The official said the first tranche of $ 2 billion would be donated “within days to weeks” and “ideally by the end of this month”. Of the additional $ 2 billion, the US plans to contribute the first $ 500 million ‘fairly quickly’ to ‘encourage some of the initial doses to be there’, but they plan to do the rest at least initially holding back to encourage other countries to make their own promises, the official said.
“This pandemic is not going to end unless we end it worldwide,” the official added.
ABC News’s Conor Finnegan reported.