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Biden Pledges To Double Global Covid-19 Vaccine Donation

On Wednesday, United States President Joe Biden announced that his administration would double its purchase of Pfizer’s Covid-19 jabs to share with other nations, aiming to vaccinate 70% of the world’s population by 2022.

With the United States’ stepped-up commitment, presented at a virtual Covid-19 summit on the UN General Assembly’s sidelines, Mr. Biden vowed to donate an extra 500 million coronavirus vaccine doses to developing countries starting next year.

The additional vaccine doses will bring total US donations under the vaccine sharing to one billion shots.

The North American country has supplied around 160 million vaccines to over 100 nations, totaling more shots donated than the remaining countries combined.

Biden explained that his approach was based on beating Covid-19 everywhere to “beat the pandemic here.”

“For every one shot we’ve administered to date in America, we have now committed to do three shots to the rest of the world,” he added.

According to epidemiology experts, about 11 billion doses are needed to vaccinate at least 70% of the world’s population. The World Health Organization (WHO) had set 40% vaccine coverage in all countries as a minimum target by late 2021.

However, health specialists consider the objective is unlikely to be met, and the US latest purchase represents only a fraction of all the Covid-19 shots needed to reach the global desired rate.

Data from the University of Oxford shows that many high-income countries have administered at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine to more than half of their population. But low-income nations have only inoculated 2% of their people with a single shot.

At the World Vaccination Summit held yesterday, Mr. Biden called on well-off countries to do more to help control the novel coronavirus.

The new US jab donation announcement comes amid concerns about the slow vaccination pace globally. World leaders, health organizations, and aid groups have publicly spoken about the inequity of access to vaccines between people in the wealthiest countries and low-income nations’ residents.

At Wednesday’s summit, UN Secretary-General António Guterres referred to the worldwide number of confirmed coronavirus-related deaths, saying: “Global health security until now has failed, to the tune of 4.5 million lives, and counting.”

“We have effective vaccines against COVID-19. We can end the pandemic. And that is why I have been appealing for a global vaccination plan and I hope this summit is a step in that direction,” he added.