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 The announcement of the vaccine donation - the largest ever by a
single country - comes before Biden meets leaders of the other Group
of Seven advanced economies in England.
"The goal of today's donation is to save lives and end the pandemic
and will provide the foundation for additional actions to be
announced in the coming days," the White House said.
U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech will provide
200 million doses in 2021 and 300 million doses in the first half of
2022, which the United States will then distribute to 92
lower-income countries and the African Union.
The shots, which will be produced at Pfizer's U.S. sites, will be
provided at a not-for-profit price.
"Our partnership with the U.S. government will help bring hundreds
of millions of doses of our vaccine to the poorest countries around
the world as quickly as possible," said Pfizer Chief Executive
Albert Bourla.
"SUPERCHARGE THE GLOBAL FIGHT"
The new donations come on top of some 80 million doses Washington
has already pledged to donate by the end of June, and $2 billion in
funding earmarked for the COVAX program led by the World Health
Organization (WHO) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and
Immunization (GAVI), the White House said.
GAVI and the WHO welcomed the initiative but anti-poverty campaign
group Oxfam called for more to be done to increase the global
production of vaccines.
"Surely, these 500 million vaccine doses are welcome as they will
help more than 250 million people, but that’s still a drop in the
bucket compared to the need across the world," said Niko Lusiani,
Oxfam America’s vaccine lead.
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 "...we need a transformation
toward more distributed vaccine manufacturing so
that qualified producers worldwide can produce
billions more low-cost doses on their own terms,
without intellectual property constraints," he
added in a statement. Biden has
backed calls for a waiver of some vaccine intellectual property
rights but there is no international accord on how to proceed.
The donation is meant to "supercharge the global fight against the
pandemic," the White House said. They will be part of the total U.S.
commitment of $4 billion to COVAX announced earlier this year, a
White House official said. The pandemic has killed
about 3.9 million people around the world, with infections reported
in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases
were identified in China in December 2019.
Washington is also taking steps to support local production of
COVID-19 vaccines in other countries, including through its Quad
initiative with Japan, India and Australia.
"President Biden has been clear that borders cannot keep this
pandemic at bay and has vowed that our nation will be the arsenal of
vaccines," the White House said.
Biden's announcement comes amid mounting pressure for the United
States, which has now given at least one shot to around 64% of its
adult population, to boost donations of COVID-19 shots to other
countries that are desperately seeking doses.
(Reporting by Steve Holland in St. Ives, England, Andrea Shalal in
Washington and Caroline Copley in Berlin; Editing by Leslie Adler,
David Evans and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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