Under pressure to close the widening global vaccination gap, the White House announced plans to invest billions of dollars to expand coronavirus vaccine manufacturing. The initiative aims to address vaccine needs in the U.S. and overseas, as well as prepare for future threats, with the goal of expanding existing capacity by an additional billion doses every year.
The administration is looking to scale manufacturing through public-private partnerships, with production starting by the second half of 2022.
“HHS [U.S. Department of Health & Human Services] is soliciting interest from companies that have experience manufacturing mRNA vaccines to identify opportunities to scale up their production capacity,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said. ”It would combine the expertise of the U.S. government in basic scientific research with the robust ability of pharmaceutical companies to manufacture mRNA vaccines.”
The announcement from the White House comes as the Biden administration faces calls from policymakers and health officials to do more to assist the world’s vaccination efforts and ensure that poorer nations have access to vaccines.
“While we have made huge strides in making sure that our own population is vaccinated, there continues to be significant... issues around access for marginalized communities,” Dr. Mati Hlatshwayo Davis, director of health for the city of St. Louis, told Yahoo Finance Live. “The global inequity is absolutely unacceptable.”
“About a month ago, only 3% of Africans were vaccinated compared to over 60% in North America. That level of global inequity keeps us within this stronghold that COVID has on us and does not get us any closer to normal,” Hlatshwayo Davis warned. “Ramping up production allows us to do better by our marginalized communities here in the U.S. and get closer to our goal of bridging the gap of global vaccine inequity.”
So far, the U.S. has donated and delivered 250 million doses to 110 countries, according to Zients, more than every other country in the world combined, with the plan to continue shipping millions more each week.
“For every one shot we’ve administered here in the United States, we’re donating about three doses to people around the world,” Zients said.
The plan laid out by the Biden administration to help increase global vaccinations comes as the White House pushes to get more Americans vaccinated. As of Thursday, about 228 million people, or 68% of the U.S. population had received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while 195 million, or 59%, of the population is fully vaccinated.
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