In an investment of the US-focused approach of its predecessor to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic, President Biden increases pressure on America’s richest allies on Friday to achieve this Covid-19 vaccine doses in poor and developing countries. Biden told his G7 colleagues during a virtual summit that the United States would contribute up to $ 4 billion to COVAX, the World Health Organization initiative that aims to ensure equitable access to vaccines around the world. the world.
A senior government official said Thursday that Biden’s announcement was aimed, at least in part, at taking advantage of U.S. partners around the world to bolster his own support for the initiative.
President Biden was pledging $ 2 billion to COVAX ahead (that is, $ 2 billion more than the United States had offered under his predecessor) and then another $ 2 billion over the next two years, as long as other nations meet their own commitments to the program. Officials said Thursday that Congress was allocating the money to the December 2020 spending bill, so it would have no impact on national vaccination efforts in the U.S.
The senior official said the White House acknowledged that ensuring health security around the world was also in the direct interest of the US.
This is a point that global health experts have been emphasizing for months: if rich nations only focus on protecting their own populations from disease, it will be more than a moral failure; virus to mutate without checking, and that could he chases again even well-vaccinated countries.
Why worry about the world?
UN officials have repeatedly urged rich countries not to leave the poor to fend for themselves, and vaccine manufacturers do not 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 worldwide HIV / AIDS pandemic that collapsed in the 1980s, he declared: “a vaccine apartheid that only serves the interests of powerful and profitable pharmaceutical companies, even though it costs us the fastest and least harmful exit from this crisis to each of us.”
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, already had it punished against vaccine manufacturers to target locations where “profits are higher.”
These arguments were largely based on moral grounds, but Byanyima also warned that pandemic narcissism could put new COVID-19 populations at risk, even if vaccinated.
“The longer the virus is allowed to continue in a context of erratic immunity, the greater the chance of mutations that could make the vaccines we have and the vaccines some people in rich countries have already received less effective or ineffective. “, he said.
Byanyima also cited research conducted for the International Chamber of Commerce, which suggests that delaying poor countries ’access to vaccines will cost money, worth approximately“ $ 9 trillion, with nearly half that amount. absorbed in rich countries such as the United States, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom “.
Real world tests
As Deborah Patta reported on CBS News this week, there are already some real evidence of the risks of leaving COVID-19 to spread and mutate into virus “deposits” around the world.
The South African government, facing a severe wave of infections and delayed for various reasons, only began its mass vaccination program a week ago. By then, the already well-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 the south of England, is much more easily transmitted among people, but studies on vaccines have shown that South African variant it also seems to make current vaccines at least a little less effective.
Most pharmaceutical companies have said that while they may need to add booster vaccines, the vaccines should work well enough to prevent serious disease with all known variants.
The real risk is strains that we do not yet know or that may arise in the future in areas where vaccines are not being developed efficiently.
“The virus is mutating, we will get more dangerous forms of this virus and we will run after it slowly 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 the “equity vaccine”
COVAX’s current goal is to get 2 billion doses of vaccine distributed by the end of this year, fairly, to the most needy countries.
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In a statement issued on Friday, WHO Director-General Tedros noted the new promises of support from the Biden administration and other nations as a “growing movement behind vaccine equity”.
“It welcomes the fact that world leaders are meeting the challenge by making new commitments to effectively end this pandemic by sharing doses and raising funds at COVAX,” he said, adding that “to prevent virus variants from harming our technologies and make it difficult with a slow global economic recovery, it is essential that leaders continue to step up to ensure that we end this pandemic as soon as possible. “