While the US has a glut of vaccines and many people have to be coaxed in to getting it with various offers of gifts and lotteries, many other countries are desperately short of vaccines even as their covid-19 cases surge. So I was glad to see Joe Biden announce that the US will share some of the unused vaccines. The move is long overdue.
President Joe Biden announced Thursday the U.S. will donate 75% of its unused COVID-19 vaccines to the U.N.-backed COVAX global vaccine sharing program, acting as more Americans have been vaccinated and global inequities have become more glaring.
Of the first tranche of 25 million doses, the White House said about 19 million will go to COVAX, with approximately 6 million for South and Central America, 7 million for Asia and 5 million for Africa. The doses mark a substantial — and immediate — boost to the lagging COVAX effort, which to date has shared just 76 million doses with needy countries.
Overall, the White House aims to share 80 million doses globally by the end of June, most through COVAX. But 25% of the nation’s excess will be kept in reserve for emergencies and for the U.S. to share directly with allies and partners.
I hear from family and friends in Sri Lanka that they are experiencing both a surge in the disease and a shortage of vaccines. Some people have received the first shot of the AstroZeneca vaccine but there is not enough to give them the second so they are waiting. Meanwhile the country has gone into a major lockdown as death rates have risen to about 40 per day, which when adjusted for population size, would correspond to about 600 per day in the US, and that too is likely an undercount.
With the WHO granting approval to the Chinese Sinovac, one hopes that the global shortage will ease.
Meanwhile, death and infection rates in India are decreasing, albeit slowly, so there’s some hope there. But the death and infection rates in Brazil seem to have plateaued at a high level, which is worrisome. The US, Brazil, and India are the countries with the highest totals of cases.
The ” Serum Institute of India (SII) … has sought the approval of the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to tackle the vaccine crisis by taking up mass production of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V in India”
Apparently SII has “has a massive production base for making vaccine and is already selling Covishield based on the so-called AstraZeneca vaccine “….
Reason #umpteen why our species sucks. This should have been a global effort from the start, with healthcare and other essential workers, as well as the most vulnerable, getting the first doses worldwide. That’s not altruism or bleeding heart bollocks, just practicality.
I find it so insidious how we all have to refer to them with their corporate labels* and may not give it a second thought, even though the blindingly obvious problem is that none of it should ever be privatized at all. I mean, we’re saying the equivalent of “the Bank of America vaccine” or “the Coca-Cola vaccine,” as if those corporate entities have any valid claim to ownership of it … but here, they really seriously don’t have that. As dumb as it is with sports stadiums and whatnot, at least in those cases we’re not handing control of global health policy over to some gigantic corporations.
*Not that we really must talk that way, but the fact is that we haven’t bothered to come up with a different set of names. At this point, it’s baked in and probably too late.
By the way, the spelling of it is AstraZeneca®, with an “a” rather than an “o.” We can at least be grateful that we’re not forced to draw that weird squiggly loop thing in their logo every time we mention them. For these purposes at least, our corporate overlords presumably want their branding to be easily used and propagated everywhere, so I doubt they will pass that kind of legislation any time soon.
Weird. It’s almost like having far right reactionary nationalists in charge at the start of the pandemic was a bad thing.
Wait’ll the rightwingers hear that Biden is sending OUR vaccines!!!1!!~!! to brown people somewhere. They’ll be clamoring to get vaccinated to make sure those people can’t have any.
A big relief that US is sharing Covid vaccine especially astroZeneca as we are short of six hundred thousand doses
as a 2nd dose as most of us have passed the dead line of 12 weeks and getting anxious as Covid is rampant here
Ridana@5- Sadly, you are spot on. It’s not just that the Trumpian anti-vaxxers are behaving like children, it’s that they’re behaving like children who are filled with hate.
“The US, Brazil, and India are the countries with the highest totals of cases.”
Well, yes, they have huge populations. Per capita things look different.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
At the moment Peru is doing worse than any of those three. The situation in Suriname is terrible as well at the moment.
4 Tabby Lavalamp
It’s almost like having far right reactionary nationalists in charge at the start of the pandemic was a bad thing.
What? Alberta, Sastachewan, Manitoba and Ontario shurely disproves this!