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In a reversal of its predecessor’s US-centric approach to addressing the coronavirus pandemic, President Biden is increasing pressure on America’s wealthiest allies on Friday to get Vaccine for COVID-19 dose in poor and developing countries. Biden told his fellow G7 leaders during a virtual summit that the US would contribute up to $ 4 billion to COVAX, the World Health Organization-backed initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to vaccines around the world. .
A senior administration official said Thursday that Biden’s announcement was aimed, at least in part, at leveraging American partners around the world to bolster their own support for the initiative.
President Biden was committing $ 2 billion to COVAX upfront, which is $ 2 billion more than the United States had offered with its predecessor, and then another $ 2 billion over the next two years, as long as other nations comply. with their own commitments to the program. Officials said Thursday that the money was allocated by Congress in the December 2020 spending bill, so it would have no impact on national vaccination efforts in the US.
The senior official said the White House recognized that ensuring health security around the world was also in the direct interest of the United States.
That’s a point that global health experts have been emphasizing for months: if wealthy nations focus only on protecting their own populations from disease, it will be more than a moral failure: it will allow the virus to mutate unchecked, and that could chase again even well vaccinated countries.
Why bother about the world?
United Nations officials have repeatedly urged rich countries not to let the poorest fend for themselves, and vaccine manufacturers not to base their vaccine distribution on profit margins.
In an article published earlier this month, Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, the UN agency created in response to the HIV / AIDS pandemic that hit the world in the 1980s, denounced “an apartheid vaccine that it only serves the interests of powerful and profitable pharmaceutical corporations while costing each of us the quickest and least damaging route out of this crisis. “
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had already vaccine manufacturers punished to target advertising to locations where “profits are highest”
Those arguments were largely based on moral grounds, but Byanyima also warned that pandemic narcissism could put wealthy nations’ own populations, even if vaccinated, at risk of further COVID-19 outbreaks.
“The longer the virus is allowed to continue in a setting of patchy immunity, the greater the possibility of mutations that could make the vaccines we have, and the vaccines that some people in rich countries have already received, less effective or ineffective “, He said.
Byanyima also cited research done for the International Chamber of Commerce, suggesting that delaying poor countries’ access to vaccines will cost money, to the tune of “about $ 9 trillion, with nearly half of this absorbed in rich countries like United States, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom “.
Evidence from the real world
As CBS News’s Debora Patta reported this week, there are already real world evidence of risks from leaving COVID-19 to spread and mutate into virus “reservoirs” around the world.
The South African government, facing a severe wave of infections and delayed for various reasons, began its mass vaccination program just a week ago. At that time, the now-known 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, like the one discovered in southern England, spreads much more easily between people, but vaccine studies have shown that South African variant It also appears to make current vaccines at least somewhat less effective.
Most drug companies have said that while they may need to add booster shots, their vaccines should work well enough to prevent serious disease with all known variants.
The real risk is strains that we do not yet know about or that may emerge in the future in areas where vaccines are not implemented efficiently.
“The virus is mutating, we are going to have more dangerous forms of this virus and we will slowly run after it as 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 equity”
COVAX’s current goal is to distribute 2 billion doses of vaccines by the end of this year, fairly, to the countries most in need.
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In a statement released Friday, WHO Director-General Tedros pointed to the new pledges of support from the Biden administration and other nations as a “growing movement behind vaccine equity.”
“I welcome world leaders are taking up the challenge by making new commitments to effectively end this pandemic by dose sharing and increasing funding for COVAX,” he said, adding that “to prevent variants of the virus from undermining our health technologies and hamper an already slow global economic recovery, it is critical that leaders continue to step forward to ensure we end this pandemic as quickly as possible. “
