US President Joe Biden has just announced that the United States will export 80 million doses of anti-Covid vaccines to make them available to the rest of the world. In detail, this delivery will include 20 million doses Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson which will be sent in two weeks in addition to the 60 million doses of AstraZeneca that Joe Biden had already promised last month.
While the AstraZeneca vaccine has yet to be approved by US health authorities, offering these doses was common sense. All this will be distributed via the Covax platform, this system which is overseen by the United Nations. The principle is simple: countries that fund it can give and receive both doses while the countries most in need receive vaccines.
For a long time, Washington had been reluctant to send its surplus vaccines, except for Canada and Mexico, which are its geographic neighbors. The Biden administration had been widely criticized for its selfishness, especially when India has become the new epicenter of the epidemic, a few weeks ago.
The United States had agreed to send ingredients necessary for the manufacture of vaccines and equipment for the production line but, until now, Washington had never given doses that were usable by Americans directly.
Protect Americans from New Variants
To explain why this important political change took so long, it is likely that Joe Biden did not want to draw criticism, while his election is still contested by a large number of pro-Trump, who are only looking for this kind of excuse to discredit him.
He had to do “America First”, to spare the voters, even if he did not share the surplus vaccine with the rest of the world. clearly does not correspond to the values put forward by the Democrats.
Joe Biden clearly explained, even quite didactically, why he only made this decision now. If the United States is so far better immunized thanks to the mass vaccination campaign, it remains vulnerable as long as the inhabitants of other countries are not vaccinated. New variants could develop there and therefore endanger the Americans, protected as they are.
The more international authorities allow the virus to mutate, the more they will have to deal with new variants. This is what the UN explained from the start, but instead of listening to it, we have seen all our countries panic and fail to coordinate.
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