Experts say the U.S. pledge to deliver 80 million vaccine doses to other countries needs boosting

The U.S. has promised 80 million vaccine doses to other countries. Experts say it isn’t nearly enough.

(New York Times)  If all goes according to plan, the United States will soon send 80 million doses of Covid vaccines to help countries beleaguered by the coronavirus, President Biden said on Monday.

But world leaders, experts and advocates warn much more is needed to stop the virus from running rampant in much of the world, which gives it time to mutate and possibly evolve until it can evade vaccines.

Activists, too, have joined the cohort of voices calling on the Biden administration to move boldly. “Donating 80 million doses of vaccines without a plan to scale up production worldwide is like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist.

Mr. Biden pledged on Monday that 20 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines — the three authorized for use in the United States — would be sent abroad. That’s from a supply of about 400 million to 500 million doses produced each month. In addition, the United States plans to send 60 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine when it is cleared for use by the Food and Drug Administration.

The number of doses needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population is a staggering 11 billion, according to researchers at Duke University. So far only about 1.7 billion have been produced, the analytics firm Airfinity estimated.

And 11 billion may be a conservative estimate, because the global need for vaccines could prove far greater if virus variants require booster shots. Raw materials and key equipment remain in short supply, and there are stark divisions among officials and experts about how best to broaden the international pool of vaccines.

The United States supports waiving patents so more countries can produce vaccines, but experts say technology transfers and expanded access to raw materials mean it would take about six months for more drug makers to start producing vaccines. European leaders say lifting export bans would provide help sooner.

On Monday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization chief, called on vaccine manufacturers to speed up delivery of hundreds of millions of doses designated for Covax, the international effort to ensure equitable vaccine distribution. He asked for richer countries to share all they could.

“We need high- income countries, which have contracted much of the immediate global supply of vaccines, to share them now,” Dr. Tedros said. “I call on manufacturers to publicly commit to helping any country that wants to share their vaccines with Covax to lift contractual barriers within days, not months.”

Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, released a statement on Monday saying that Covax would soon complete delivering 65 million doses, but that it should have delivered at least 170 million and that the effort could be short by as much as 190 million doses by the time Group of 7 leaders gather in England in June. ...