The United States will provide some four million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada under a loan agreement. Last week it became known that the US has a large stock of the vaccine, which will not be done until the drug is not approved for use in the country.
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Mexico will receive 2.5 million doses of the vaccine, Canada will receive 1.5 million. The agreement means that Mexico and Canada will reimburse the US with vaccine doses later this year. “We are lending a portion of our release doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine,” a source told Reuters on condition of anonymity. “We can only get out of the virus if we help our global partners.”
White House spokesman Jen Paski confirmed the plan. “It’s not quite finalized yet, but that’s our goal,” she said during a press briefing.
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President Joe Biden’s administration is under pressure from allies around the world to share vaccines, especially AstraZeneca’s. It has already been approved for use in other countries, but not yet in the United States.
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Millions of doses in stock
Currently, an AstraZeneca facility in West Chester, Ohio, stocks some 30 million doses. Emergent BioSolutions in Maryland, with which AstraZeneca has entered into an agreement to manufacture their vaccine, has also already produced enough vaccine for tens of millions of doses. For the time being, however, nothing is being done about this, because clinical trials with the AstraZeneca vaccine in the US are still underway. Once approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the vaccine will also be administered to US citizens.
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End of May
The supply to Mexico and Canada would not jeopardize Biden’s plan to vaccinate all American adults by the end of May. The US president is willing to share even more doses of the vaccine with the rest of the world if it turns out that the US has a surplus in the long run. For the time being, however, there are no concrete plans to share more vaccines with other countries.
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The US does not need the AstraZeneca stock to meet its end-May target. After all, three other vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer Inco / BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, have pledged to deliver nearly 500 million doses to the country of some 332 million inhabitants by then.
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European Medicines Agency EMA insists: “AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and effective”
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