The U.S. Is Buying 500 Million Vaccine Doses for the World. It’s Not Enough.
It’s in America’s self-interest to vaccinate the world
The U.S. is adding even more vaccine doses to its already-impressive stockpile, with drugmaker Moderna announcing yesterday that it had sold another 200 million doses of its mRNA Covid vaccine to the U.S., bringing total American orders of the vaccine to a half billion doses. That’s good news for the U.S. — the doses could be used to vaccinate children in the fall, or could potentially be used as booster shots. But it also underscores how much more it — and other rich countries — could be doing to help vaccinate the rest of the world.
That may seem like an odd thing to say, given that just last week, the Biden administration announced that it would be buying 500 million doses of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine and donating them to low- and middle-income countries via the World Health Organization’s Covax initiative. But while that was a welcome development, it was just a first step, and not an especially ambitious one at that. What’s really needed, as I wrote about last month, is a comprehensive plan for global vaccination. And the Pfizer deal, great as it is, isn’t it.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear that policymakers in developed countries really understand the urgency for such a…
