WASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced Thursday it will donate by month’s end millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Latin America and the Caribbean, where increased movement between countries and relaxed public health measures are causing the deadly coronavirus and its variants to spread.
While the United States has about 51% of its population vaccinated, the rest of the region continues to see mounting infections and hospitalizations amid low vaccination rates. The World Health Organization and its regional arm, the Pan American Health Organization, have been pleading for months that the U.S. and other rich countries with surplus vaccines share their extra supplies with poorer countries.
The bulk of the 25 million U.S. doses will be given through the U.N.-backed vaccine global access platform known as COVAX, which is aimed at getting shots in the arms of people in poor and middle-income countries. Of the 19 million doses that the administration said it would donate via COVAX, six million are directed at South and Central America nations as well as the Caribbean Community.
“This vaccine strategy is a vital component of our overall global strategy to lead the world in the fight to defeat COVID-19, including emergency public health assistance and aid to stop the spread and building global public health capacity and readiness to beat not just this pandemic, but the next one,” the White House said in a statement.
Another six million vaccine doses will be donated directly to several countries that are considered strategic foreign policy partners, some of whom are struggling with surging infection rates, including Mexico, Canada and Haiti. This list also includes South Korea, Ukraine, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt.
Poverty-stricken and politically unstable, Haiti is the only country in the hemisphere that has not yet administered a single shot of a COVID-19 vaccine. The White House announcement said its dose-sharing approach prioritizes Latin America and the Caribbean on a per capita basis, favoring populous countries.
The donations are part of a Biden administration plan to share 80 million U.S. vaccines worldwide, prioritizing Latin America and the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia and Africa. In the lead-up to the announcement, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke Thursday morning to the leaders of Mexico, Guatemala, India and Trinidad and Tobago, whose prime minister also serves as chairman of the 15-member Caribbean Community regional bloc known as CARICOM.
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières said while the administration’s pledge to share its supply of vaccines is a positive move, “the pace and scale of the US COVID-19 global vaccine response is woefully inadequate given the global emergency.”
“The U.S. government has secured enough doses to protect its entire population of 330 million and still have more than half a billion surplus vaccines left over. It must commit to quickly sharing more of its surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses if it truly wants to end the pandemic,” the medical aid group said in a statement.
The administration has not specified which vaccine makers would make up the designated donations, and was careful to note the donations are not at the expense of supplies available for U.S. citizens.
The announcement also suggested a return of the U.S. to its traditional role on the global stage, a show of support to international organizations and was an indirect rebuke of the isolationist America First policies of the prior Trump administration that rankled allies.
“We are sharing these doses not to secure favors or extract concessions. We are sharing these vaccines to save lives and to lead the world in bringing an end to the pandemic, with the power of our example and with our values,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
While the United States focused inward, Russia and China aggressively exploited the off-putting U.S. policy by engaging in so-called vaccine diplomacy, offering their respective Sputnik and Sinopharm vaccines to desperate nations in the hemisphere either at low cost or free.
An investigative analysis last month by the Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and the McClatchy Washington Bureau detailed the struggle of ordinary people across the Americas to get treatment for the coronavirus and later a vaccine. In a region of 653 million inhabitants, only about 10% had received a first vaccine dosage by early May. One health official referred to it as “vaccine apartheid.”
And a subsequent story showed that across the region, those with means and/or a visa to the United States are cramming into jet planes to travel to Miami, Las Vegas, Dallas and other cities in what’s come to be known as vaccine tourism.
The renewed surge of the coronavirus has proven costly for some countries. Colombia was removed in May as a co-host of this year’s Copa America soccer tournament, scheduled to run from June 13 to July 10. Then this past Sunday, co-host Argentina was removed, having shut down its own domestic soccer league until the end of May amid the virus’ spread. Games were to be held in Argentina with the final in Colombia, but the whole tournament will now be held in Brazil.
Shortly after the Biden administration’s Thursday announcement, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that the United States was sending Mexico a million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which, unlike the other popular vaccines, needs only a single injection.
Mexico’s vaccine rollout has been difficult. As of Tuesday, there were nearly 17,000 registered active coronavirus cases and at least 228,146 people had died from COVID-19, although that official number is considered to be artificially low.
Haiti has not posted anywhere near the number of cases or deaths as Mexico, or even its neighboring Dominican Republic, which leads the Caribbean with 296,000 reported infections since the pandemic began and 3,637 deaths. But Haiti’s weak health system, lack of hospitals and COVID-19 beds — there are only between 200 and 240 — for its 11.5 million population, are sparking concern as infections and deaths mount and hospitals turn away infected patients.
The worries about Haiti’s inability to cope with the kind of surge other hot spots in Latin America and the Caribbean have seen led the head of the Pan American Health Organization, Dr. Carissa Etienne, this week to call on the international community to scale up its support to Haiti to help curb transmissions.
In recent days some Haitians have complained that despite receiving authorization from the country’s health ministry they have been prevented by the U.S. from importing donated vaccines. A spokesperson with the U.S. State Department said there is no ban on vaccines and referenced Thursday’s announcement.
“The U.S. Embassy is committed to facilitating the delivery of vaccines to Haiti. The U.S. government, through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is also providing the equivalent of $450,000 in support to the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) to secure more vaccines, as well as to improve its logistics capability for storage and distribution of the vaccine,” the spokesperson said.
Ahead of the U.S. announcement, Haiti’s health ministry also reached out to Dr. Paul Farmer, a world-renowned infectious disease specialist and chief strategist for Boston-based Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante in Haiti, to ask for his help in securing doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for roughly 5.5 million Haitians. The University Hospital of Mirebalais, run by Farmer’s non-governmental organization, was the first to open its doors to COVID-19 patients and operates 100 beds among three sites.
Over the past week, there were 1.1 million new COVID-19 cases and over 25,000 deaths related to the disease reported in the Americas region, PAHO said this week. Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases and deaths in Latin America and the Caribbean nearly doubled in the first five months of this year, Etienne said.
The delivery of 17.6 million vaccine doses to the Americas through the COVAX platform, she said, was not keeping up with the pandemic. While the distribution of additional vaccines will not immediately end the deadly global pandemic, it is a ray of hope, Etienne said in calling for more donations.
“Regional solidarity, including the donation of doses, will be key to get us through the current shortage of supply,” she said. “Vaccines will save lives now and prevent future waves, but for the current surge in infections we have to deploy the tools we have at hand.”
______
