US pledges 500m more BioNTech/Pfizer Covid vaccine doses to poorest nations

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Joe Biden has urged rich countries to donate more Covid-19 vaccines to poorer parts of the world, as he announced the US will buy another 500m doses of BioNTech/Pfizer’s vaccine to give away.

“The United States is leading the world on vaccination donations,” the US president said on Wednesday during a global vaccine summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. “As we’re doing that we need other high income countries to deliver on their own ambitious vaccine donations and pledges.”

The US has now committed to donate over 1bn doses of Covid-19 vaccines around the world by the end of next year, largely through Covax, the vaccine sharing initiative back by the World Health Organisation. About 160m US-donated shots have already been distributed to 100 countries, Biden said.

But the president has also been criticised for not doing more to force American companies to establish vaccine manufacturing abroad and for backing calls to offer fully vaccinated people in the US booster shots.

The gap between vaccination rates in higher- and lower-income countries has been increasing. According to Our World in Data, 2 per cent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose of any vaccine. For richer nations, that rate exceeds 50 per cent.

The World Health Organization has condemned hoarding jabs by richer nations, including for boosters, and called for a moratorium on third shots until at least the end of the year in an effort to boost vaccination rates in the developing world.

Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and vice-provost of global initiatives at University of Pennsylvania, said Biden wanted to demonstrate that the US was leading the global Covid response amid big delays in the rollout of vaccines to developing nations.

“The problem is big and fundamentally important and we need another focus to solve it,” said Emanuel, adding that global efforts aimed at providing equitable access to vaccines had failed to deliver on their objectives.

This month the WHO-backed initiative Covax slashed its forecast for vaccine deliveries to the developing world by about a quarter to 1.4bn shots in 2021, compared with earlier projections of 2bn. India’s ban on Covid vaccine exports, manufacturing problems and delays in approving new vaccines such as those from Novavax and Clover contributed to the shortfall.

Logistical problems in distributing vaccines — some of which require expensive cold storage freezers — have also hampered efforts in extending inoculation programmes beyond wealthy nations. Under 4 per cent of Africa’s population has been fully vaccinated compared with 54 per cent in the US.

Biden said the US would give $370m to help countries administer vaccines and a further $380m to Gavi, a vaccine alliance with the goal of increasing access to immunisation in poor countries.

Gordon Brown, the UK’s former prime minister and now a WHO ambassador for global health financing, told the Financial Times that attendees at the vaccine summit would make “decisions about people who are going to live or die”.

“The countries that have control over the vaccines haven’t been serious enough about giving the vaccines to people other than themselves,” he said.