The US is under increasing pressure to share doses of Covid-19 vaccine with less affluent nations as lawyers call for the prevention of emerging “vaccine apartheid” and point to the strategic and diplomatic importance of sharing essential medicines.
Calls to share vaccine doses have risen further this week, after the Biden administration announced an additional 100 million doses of vaccine from Johnson & Johnson. The US government has now bought enough doses of vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson to vaccinate 500 million people – almost the entire eligible population twice.
The administration also owns the rights to 100 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine. The vaccine has not been licensed in the United States, but is licensed for use in other parts of the world. AstraZeneca has called on the United States to pay “considerable attention” to vaccine donation elsewhere, a company spokesman said.
“I’m doing this because in this war effort, we need maximum flexibility,” Biden said at a White House briefing announcing the acquisition this week. “There is always a chance that we will face unexpected challenges.”
On Friday, Biden and leaders in Japan, Australia and India – an informal working group known as Quad – announced they will work to increase production capacity to send doses of 1 billion Covid-19 vaccines to island countries from Asia and the Pacific. 2022.
But Biden administration officials continued to resist sending doses of vaccine stored abroad, saying it was part of a plan to be “over-prepared and over-supplied” if Covid-19 variants or immunity in drop requires booster shots.
“We want to be part of the worldwide effort to vaccinate people around the world in a number of countries,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was quoted as citing a $ 2 billion commitment to Covax. global effort to distribute covid vaccines19.
However, she said that “the first priority and emphasis of the president is to ensure that the American people are vaccinated. And once we are in that moment, we will have a discussion about what is to come ”.
The administration’s strategy is also a protection against any potential production disruptions and could provide a number of vaccines for children, if and when clinical trials show that they are safe for use in children under 16 years of age.
The Biden administration plans to raise all vaccine eligibility requirements by May 1 and hopes to vaccinate all 267 million eligible Americans by the July 4 holiday. More than 530,000 Americans have died after contracting the virus, a number the administration often mentions when defending its addiction to the vaccine.
“As I told you before, I carry a card in my pocket with the number of Americans who have died of Covid so far,” Biden said in a spring speech on Thursday. “It simply came to our notice then. Currently, the total number of deaths in America: 527,726. There are more deaths than in World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War and September 11 together.
However, countries such as China and Russia have agreed to share vaccines in order to gain a strategic advantage. Chinese vaccine manufacturers have promised half a billion doses in 45 countries, according to an Associated Press report.
“We may be overtaken by others who are more willing to share, even if they do so for cynical reasons,” Ivo H Daalder, former NATO ambassador and chairman of the Chicago Council for Global Affairs, told the New York Times. “I think countries will remember who was there for us when we needed them.”
A recent World Bank analysis found that 82% of high-income countries started vaccinations, compared to 3% of low-income countries. A January forecast by the Economist Intelligence Unit showed that middle-income countries are likely to vaccinate their mass population 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 could never reach the immunity of the herd. .
“It will define the global economy, the global political landscape, travel, just about anything,” said Agathe Demarais, the unit’s forecast director at the time of the report’s publication.
Lawyers described the gap in access to vaccines between rich and poor countries as a potential “apartheid of the vaccine”. Many have he said non-sharing of vaccines threatens to repeat the failures of the HIV / AIDS epidemic.
“A first-rate approach could serve short-term political interests, but it is self-defeating and will lead to a prolonged recovery, with trade and travel continuing to suffer,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in The Guardian.
The threat is clear: as long as the virus spreads everywhere, it has more opportunities to move and potentially undermines the effectiveness of vaccines everywhere. We could get back to first place, “he said.
Ghebreyesus is among the lawyers who have asked pharmaceutical companies to waive the intellectual property rights granted by the World Trade Organization. The hope is that the temporary renunciation of patents would allow the large-scale production of vaccines.
The petition would waive certain rights guaranteed by what is called the TRIPS agreement. The issue is facing the WTO, which is expected to debate the petition twice at future meetings in April. The petition is largely supported by lower-income countries and opposes high-income nations.
“We need to make sure that we finally deliver,” said WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. In this way, she said, “the millions of people who are waiting for us with bad breath know that we are working on concrete solutions.”