US to donate additional 500m Pfizer and BioNTech Covid vaccine doses

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BioNTech and Pfizer have expanded their deal with the US to provide an additional 500m doses of their Covid-19 vaccine at a not-for-profit price to the world’s poorest countries, which are grappling with severe shortages.

The US will distribute the doses through donations to 92 lower-middle-income countries as well as the 55 member states of the African Union, the companies said in a joint statement on Wednesday.

US president Joe Biden is expected to announce the deal at a global vaccine summit later on Wednesday, which will bring the total number of BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine doses pledged by the US to more than 1bn.

The companies expect to have delivered them by the end of September next year. An initial deal for 500m doses was announced in June this year, with deliveries starting in August.

The shots would be manufactured at Pfizer’s US facilities and be sold at cost price, the companies said.

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-19 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 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-19 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.

Emanuel said Biden’s plan to set a target to vaccinate 70 per cent of the world’s population in a year was a good way to motivate the bureaucracy to act but delivery would be a significant challenge.

“Getting to 70 per cent is roughly between five to six billion people and we are nowhere near that,” he added. 

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.