[The Biden administration, under
pressure to help with a surge raging out of control, will also supply
therapeutics, test kits, ventilators and protective gear.]
By Katie Rogers and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
“Just as India sent assistance to
the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the
United States is determined to help India in its time of need,” Emily Horne, a
spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in a statement on Sunday.
The announcement, an abrupt shift
for the administration, came after Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national
security adviser, held a call earlier in the day with Ajit Doval, his
counterpart in India, and as the Indian government reported more than 349,000
new infections, a world record for a single day. Ms. Horne said the United
States had “identified sources of specific raw material urgently required for
Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine,” the Indian-produced version of
the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The situation in India is dire. The
country is witnessing perhaps the worst
crisis any nation has suffered since the pandemic began, with
hospitals overflowing and desperate people dying in line waiting to see doctors
— and mounting evidence that the actual death toll is far higher than
officially reported. Officials say they are running desperately low on
supplies, including oxygen and protective gear, as a deadly new variant
is thought to be behind a rise in cases.
Many Indians are frustrated that
their country, the world’s largest producer of vaccines, is so behind in its
own inoculation campaign. Fewer than 10 percent of Indians have received even
one dose, and just 1.6 percent are fully vaccinated, according to a New
York Times database — even though India is producing two vaccines on
its own soil.
Yet even as horrifying images of
strained hospitals and orange
flames from mass cremation sites circulated around the world last
week, administration officials had pushed back as pressure mounted for the
United States to broaden its effort to combat the surge in India. For Mr.
Biden, the crisis in India amounts to a clash of competing forces. The president
came into office vowing to restore America’s place as a leader in global
health, and he has repeatedly said the pandemic does not stop at the nation’s
borders.
But he is also grappling with the
legacy of his predecessor’s “America First” approach, and he must weigh his
instincts to help the world against the threat of a political backlash for
giving vaccines away before every American has had a chance to get a shot. As
of Sunday, 28.5 percent of Americans were fully vaccinated, and 42.2 percent
had had at least one dose, according
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’re going to start off making
sure Americans are taken care of first, but we’re then going to try and help
the rest of the world,” Mr.
Biden said last month, after he committed to providing financial support to
help Biological E, a major vaccine manufacturer in India, produce at least one
billion doses of coronavirus vaccines by the end of 2022.
But Mr. Biden’s commitments have
gone only so far. India and South Africa have asked the World Trade
Organization for a temporary waiver to an international intellectual property
agreement that would give poorer countries easier access to generic versions of
coronavirus vaccines and treatments. The administration is blocking that
request.
“The Biden administration can still
do more,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who has been at the
forefront of pushing for the temporary waiver, said in a statement on Sunday.
Mr. Khanna also called for the
United States to release doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine — which is not
approved for distribution in this country — to India, as it has for Canada
and Mexico.
Tens of millions of doses of the
AstraZeneca vaccine are sitting
stockpiled in the United States, and Mr. Biden said last week that he
was considering sharing more. But the vaccine was manufactured at the Emergent
BioSolutions plant in Baltimore, where production has been
halted amid concerns
about possible contamination.
“We’re looking at what is going to
be done with some of the vaccines that we are not using,” the president said on
Wednesday. “We’ve got to make sure they are safe to be sent.”
The statement on Sunday did not
mention the possibility of the United States directly sending vaccines to
India. But in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Dr. Anthony S.
Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said the United States
would consider sending some doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine there.
“I don’t want to be speaking for
policy right now with you, but, I mean, that’s something that certainly is
going to be actively considered,” Dr. Fauci said.
India is home to the Serum
Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker. But vaccine production
has lagged behind the needs of India’s 1.3 billion people. Adar Poonawalla, the
institute’s chief executive, appealed to Mr. Biden in mid-April over Twitter.
“I humbly request you to lift the
embargo of raw material exports out of the U.S. so that vaccine production can
ramp up,” he wrote.
But until Sunday, the
administration resisted. Asked on Thursday why America would not lift its ban, Ned Price, the State Department
spokesman, told reporters that “the United States first and foremost is engaged
in an ambitious and effective and, so far, successful effort to vaccinate the
American people.”
The resistance was met with
criticism from Indian politicians and health experts.
“By stockpiling vaccines &
blocking the export of crucial raw materials needed for vaccine production, the
United States is undermining the strategic Indo-US partnership,” Milind Deora,
a politician from Mumbai, one of the hardest-hit cities, said on Twitter.
In addition to assisting India with
protective gear and raw materials, Ms. Horne said on Sunday that the United
States would deploy a team of public health advisers from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Jeffrey Gettleman contributed
reporting from New Delhi, and Chris Cameron from Washington.
