At a COVID summit meeting on Sep. 22, President Biden announced that the U.S. will purchase an additional 500 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine to donate overseas and $370 million to administer the shots. But critics say while these additional doses are welcome, it won’t nearly be enough to address the critical vaccine shortfall in the developing world. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program, who talks about the urgent need to quickly expand the world’s vaccine supply in order to end the global coronavirus pandemic.
PETER MAYBARDUK: So this was a summit convened by the White House, contemporaneous with the United Nations General Assembly. This summit deserved to be a debate of historic dimensions — deserved to be a moment where developing countries were able to take wealthy countries to task for hoarding vaccines, hoarding the doses and hoarding the knowledge to make vaccines and making it far more difficult for the world to scale up access. And, that’s not what transpired. It was a much more staged performance than that.
However, it is very important that we get every last dose that we can. And if we look at it from a perspective of the White House was not about to transform its politics — politics of the nation, of the world to deliver a more aggressive response to COVID — if our ambitions are less than that, then we can see that there are many people in many agencies working hard to accelerate the dose delivery timetables. And so that’s significant.However, it is the case in our opinion that the U.S. government has tools left unused on the table that the U.S. government could have from the beginning and certainly could now retrofit manufacturing facilities at sites around the world with the best vaccine technology to make billions of doses in a matter of some months, certainly less than a year. Our own estimate is that 55 production lines in 14 manufacturing sites could be stood up in less than six months and churning out this at scale to reach 8 billion doses of the best possible vaccines in a year’s time.
And, you know, the NIH Moderna vaccine, for example, seems to be emerging as the best of the vaccines. And it’s the vaccine that was paid for almost entirely with public money. You and I paid for the development of the NIH Moderna vaccine from its earliest days to the present, and that should be made available to humanity. The Biden administration has the power to do that, has the power to set up the facilities, offer the financial capital, offer the technical expertise and exercise the political leadership to help coordinate such a project.
If the United States moved first, certainly many other countries — we do it in a cooperative, multilateral fashion — and the U.S. government also has the power to sit down with Moderna and encourage Moderna to share its technology or alternately simply order the sharing of that technology under the Defense Production Act and other authorities. That’s the sort of transformative response that is needed to end the pandemic as quickly as possible and this preventable suffering and death. And that’s the sort of thing that the Biden administration has been unwilling to do.
SCOTT HARRIS: What’s at stake in your view, if under-vaccinated nations don’t get access to vaccines soon. Of course, we’ve heard about more dangerous variants that will impact not just those nations, but the entire world. It really isn’t a matter as I’ve been understanding of altruism about the health and welfare of people around the world, it’s really in our own self-interest and self-preservation to make sure as many people across the globe get vaccinated as soon as possible.
PETER MAYBARDUK: That’s right, because there’ll be more transmission and potentially more variants which we cannot predict. We are in for a longer pandemic if we don’t do everything we can to get those first shots to everyone who needs them. So it’s absolutely in our self-interest at home to mitigate and also to mitigate economic damage because it’s a global economy. It’s connected and all the world is suffering for the ongoing harm that the pandemic is causing. So it’s an absolute priority for everyone. But it does require a different level of ambition and a bit of imagination and leadership. Not just doing the next thing, the next step, but thinking of along the lines of a transformational response that meets the scale of the crisis. And in that regard, we are still waiting.
We need the Senate Health Committee Chairman, Patty Murray, to support billions of dollars for global vaccine manufacturing. The House is advancing it and it comes to the Senate and the White House position also will matter, but there’s a Global Vaccination Caucus now that has said, “Here are billions of dollars.” They started with $2 (billion); we need to get to $5 billion to boost global vaccine manufacturing. And it’s shortly before the Senate; the Senate Health Committee will decide. So you can call your member, call your Senator and get that support for that signing.
