1 July, 2021: President Joe Biden came up well short on his goal of delivering 80 million doses of coronavirus vaccine to the rest of the world by the end of June as a host of logistical and regulatory hurdles slowed the pace of U.S. vaccine diplomacy.
Although the Biden administration has announced that about 50 countries and entities will receive additional doses of COVID-19 vaccine, the United States has sent less than 24 million doses to 10 recipients, according to the Associated Press. The White House says more will be sent in the coming days and stressed that Biden has done everything in his power to fulfill that commitment.
This is not for lack of doses. The White House says all American shots are ready on board. Instead, legal requirements, health codes, customs clearance, cold storage chains, language barriers, and delivery programs are taking longer than expected to sort through a complex web. To complicate matters further is that no two shipments are alike.
One country needs a cabinet process to approve vaccine donations, other inspectors need to do their own check on U.S. food safety, and still others need to develop key aspects of their vaccine distribution. This is to ensure that the vaccine can reach people before they go bad. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the internal arrangements, said that as of Wednesday, all wanted recipients had received a U.S. offer of a specific number and type of vaccine, and from the U.S. There were all legal and logistical barriers.
The White House declined to say which nations were creating what kind of local barriers, saying it was working with individual recipients to remove barriers to delivery.
“What we’ve found to be the biggest challenge is not actually the supply — we have plenty of doses to share with the world — but this is a Herculean logistical challenge,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week.
It took months for the U.S. to get its domestic vaccination program running at full throttle, and officials noted that Biden only shifted the focus of the nation’s COVID-19 response toward the global vaccination campaign less than two months ago.
Biden announced the 80 million target on May 17, saying, “This will be more vaccines than any country has actually shared to date — five times more than any other country — more than Russia and China.” Even while missing his goal, Biden has made the U.S. the largest global vaccine donor, delivering more doses than either Russia or China, who have at times sought to leverage their vaccines for geopolitical gain.
The 80 million doses are meant as a down payment on a far larger plan to purchase and donate 500 million vaccine doses for the world over the next year. That plan, relying on a purchase contract from Pfizer that will begin delivering doses in August, remains on track, officials said. Last week the White House broadly outlined its plans for all 80 million doses, but it is not publicly releasing a list of how many and of what type of vaccines each recipient will get until the doses are on the way.
The U.S. recipients to date are Colombia (2.5 million Johnson & Johnson doses), Bangladesh (2.5 million Moderna), Peru (2 million Pfizer), Pakistan (2.5 million Moderna), Honduras (1.5 million Moderna), Brazil (3 million J&J), South Korea (1 million J&J), Taiwan (2.5 million Moderna), Canada (1 million Moderna, 1.5 million AstraZeneca) and Mexico (1.35 million J&J, 2.5 million AstraZeneca). All told, it’s enough vaccine to fully protect 15.9 million people.
Biden initially pledged to supply 60 million ready-made doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to other countries, which is not yet authorized in the United States but has been widely accepted around the world. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has been set aside for export through a two-month safety review by the Food and Drug Administration. Given the declining domestic demand for vaccine quantities, the Biden administration expects it to be able to meet its 80 million full commitment without the AstraZeneca doses, but with existing stockpiles of Pfizer, Moderna and J&J vaccines.
US-approved shots – especially MRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Modern – are more effective than other vaccines, especially the emerging strains of the virus that are more contagious and harmful. The Delta variant was first identified in India.
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