Victor Guevara, a 72-year-old Honduran lawyer, knows several people his age who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in many countries. His own relatives in Houston have been inoculated.
But he, like many more in the Central American country, is still waiting to be inoculated. Additionally, he wonders more and more why the United States does not do much to help other nations, particularly as supplies of the vaccine in the United States begin to exceed demand and the doses that have been approved for use in other parts of the world. But not in the United States, they are still detained on North American soil.
Honduras has obtained an insignificant amount for its 10 million inhabitants: 59,000 doses. Africa, where only 36 million doses have been purchased for the continent’s 1.3 billion people, has also experienced a similar vaccine access gap, as well as parts of Asia.
In contrast, nearly 90 million Americans – more than a quarter of the population – have been fully vaccinated and there are so many supplies that some states are rejecting planned shipments by the federal government.
This unbalanced access to vaccines prompts more and more requests around the world for the United States to begin shipping supplies to the poorest countries. This represents an early test for President Joe Biden, who has vowed to restore American leadership in the world and show suspicious countries that the United States is a reliable partner after years of entrenchment during the Trump administration.
J. Stephen Morrison, vice president and director of the Global Center for Health Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that as the United States moves from scarcity to abundance of vaccines, it has a unique opportunity to “shape the results dramatically in this next phase due to the assets we have ”.
Biden, who came to the job in January as the virus ravaged the United States, has been cautious in his responses to calls for help from abroad.
Most of your government’s vaccination efforts have focused on domestic needs. It kept in force an agreement approved by the Trump administration demanding that pharmaceutical companies that received support from the United States in the development or expansion of the manufacture of vaccines sell to the federal government their first doses produced in the country. The United States has also used the Defense Production Act to secure vital supplies for vaccine production, a measure that has blocked the export of some supplies.
The lack of US support for vaccination around the world created a huge diplomatic opportunity for China and Russia, which have promised other countries millions of doses of domestically produced vaccines, although there have been production delays that have hampered delivery of the vaccines. some supplies. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said this month that China opposes “vaccine nationalism” and that vaccines should be a global public good.
There are many people to blame, said Marco Tulio Medina, coordinator of the committee of the National Autonomous University of Honduras for COVID-19. He mentioned his own government’s half-hearted approach and ferocity in the vaccine market, but says the rich can do more. Some rich countries lack humanism, he said.
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Miller reported from Washington, DC Associated Press journalists Christopher Sherman in Mexico City, Cara Anna in Nairobi, Aniruddha Ghosal in Delhi, Huizhong Wu in Taipei, David Biller in Rio de Janeiro, Gisela Salomon in Miami, Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala and Andrew Meldrum and Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this report.
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