![]() owned vaccines, through COVAX or other mechanism ![]() Provide multilateral donations of U.S.Provide further bilateral or regional donations of U.S.Administration announced an additional 20 million other U.S.-owned and authorized vaccines will be donated by the end of June.Administration announced 60 million AstraZeneca doses to be donated after FDA safety review.Administration “loaned” up to 4 million U.S.-owned doses of AstraZeneca to Mexico and Canada.Table 1: Summary of Primary Policy Options for Expanding Global Access to COVID-19 Vaccines, and U.S. Relaxing or waiving intellectual property (patent) restrictions on COVID-19 vaccine technologies.Helping to expand vaccine manufacturing.Providing additional funding for global vaccine efforts such as COVAX.Scaling up in-kind donations of surplus COVID-19 vaccines.These policy options fall into four main areas: This brief reviews the main policy options that have been proposed, and related questions, and identifies the actions taken by the administration thus far (see Table 1). But with global COVID-19 cases reaching their highest levels to date in recent weeks and many countries facing unprecedented waves of cases and deaths, there have been increasing calls for the U.S. interest, and the Biden administration has already taken some steps to address the issue (see Table 1). Ultimately, ensuring widespread global access to COVID-19 vaccines, which is key to preventing cases and deaths and contributing to global population immunity, is a significant challenge and one that could threaten the ability to control the pandemic.įederal officials, from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, have argued that addressing global vaccine inequity is in the U.S. Further, the expected need for booster doses and reformulated vaccines to address waning immunity and variants means global demand is likely to remain extremely high for the foreseeable future. Recent actions restricting or pausing the use of the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines in some countries due to extremely rare but serious side effects could reverberate globally, potentially prolonging the vaccine access gap given that these two vaccines have been positioned as key workhorses for ramping up vaccinations in LMICs in particular. ![]() Furthermore, while manufacturers are scaling up vaccine production, total projected production in 2021 of 9.8 billion is still short of estimated need of up to 11.5 billion to vaccinate everyone globally. The same cannot be said for the majority of countries around the world, especially low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where access has been limited and will remain so for some time. is expected to soon have enough COVID-19 vaccine doses on hand to fully vaccinate just about everyone in the country once, and, with additional doses already purchased, could likely vaccinate the population twice over.
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