President Joe Biden announced plans to send 20 million doses of U.S.-authorized COVID-19 vaccines abroad by the end of June.
“I’m announcing we will also share U.S.-authorized vaccine doses of Pfizer and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, as they become available, with the rest of the world as well. The United States will share at least 20 million of those doses, that extra supply with other countries,” Biden said on Monday.
The plan to send 20 million doses to be sent within the next six weeks is in addition to the administration’s pledge to send as many as 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, once it is deemed safe in the U.S. in the coming months, to other countries.
“This means over the next six weeks, the United States of America will send 80 million doses overseas,” Biden said. “That represents 13% of the vaccines produced by the United States by the end of June. This will be more vaccines than any country has actually shared to date.”
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The supply of vaccines has outpaced demand in the U.S., which has now administered nearly 273 million doses of vaccine. Almost 60% of adults have had at least one dose. The U.S. will likely have 300 million or more excess doses of vaccines by the end of July, Duke University researchers concluded last month.
The country is on track to fulfill Biden’s goal of getting 70% of U.S. adults at least one shot by the Fourth of July, therefore allowing people from multiple households to gather safely for the holiday for the first time since 2019.
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“The United States will continue to donate our excess supply as that supply’s delivered to us, but that won’t be nearly enough,” Biden said. “We need what we need to do is lead an entirely new effort, an effort that involves working with the pharmaceutical companies and others, and partner nations to vastly increase supply.”
Biden caught heat from the pharmaceutical industry early this month when he announced his support for temporarily waiving patent protections for U.S.-authorized vaccines in an effort to help other countries manufacture generic versions of the shots.
“This will take longer than our immediate work to donate from existing supplies, and we’re going to be asking other nations to help shoulder the economic cost of this effort, but the consequences will be more lasting and more dramatic,” Biden said. “Doing this will help us beat the pandemic and leave us with a manufacturing capacity here to prepare for the next crisis.”
