[The White House’s move is part of a nascent campaign to inoculate the world, and came as President Biden faced intense pressure to do more.]
By Sharon LaFraniere, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Noah Weiland
The White House reached the deal
just in time for Mr.
Biden’s eight-day European trip, which is his first opportunity to reassert
the United States as a world leader and restore relations that were badly
frayed by President Donald J. Trump.
“We have to end Covid-19, not just
at home, which we’re doing, but everywhere,” Mr. Biden told
American troops after landing at R.A.F. Mildenhall in Suffolk,
England. “There’s no wall high enough to keep us safe from this pandemic or the
next biological threat we face, and there will be others. It requires
coordinated multilateral action.”
People familiar with the Pfizer
deal said the United States would pay for the doses at a “not for profit”
price. The first 200 million doses will be distributed by the end of this year,
followed by 300 million by next June, they said. The doses will be distributed
through Covax, the international vaccine-sharing initiative.
Mr. Biden is in Europe for a week
to attend the NATO and Group of 7 summits and to meet with President Vladimir
V. Putin of Russia in Geneva. He is likely to use the trip to call on other
nations to step up vaccine distribution.
In a statement on Wednesday,
Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House official in charge of devising a global
vaccination strategy, said Mr. Biden would “rally the world’s democracies
around solving this crisis globally, with America leading the way to create the
arsenal of vaccines that will be critical in our global fight against
Covid-19.”
The White House is trying to
spotlight its success in fighting the pandemic — particularly its vaccination
campaign — and use that success as a diplomatic tool, especially as China and
Russia seek to do the same. Mr. Biden has been insistent that, unlike China and
Russia, which have been sharing their vaccines with dozens of countries, the
United States will not seek to extract promises from countries receiving American-made
vaccines.
The 500 million doses still fall
far short of the 11 billion the World Health Organization estimates are needed
to vaccinate the world, but significantly exceed what the United States has
committed to share so far. Other nations have been pleading with the United
States to give up some of its abundant vaccine supplies. Less than 1 percent of
people are fully
vaccinated in a number of African countries, compared with 42 percent
in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Advocates for global health
welcomed the news, but reiterated their stance that it is not enough for the
United States to simply give vaccine away. They say the Biden administration
must create the conditions for other countries to manufacture vaccines on their
own, including transferring technology to make the doses.
“The world needs urgent new
manufacturing to produce billions more doses within a year, not just
commitments to buy the planned inadequate supply,” Peter Maybarduk, the
director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, said in a statement.
He added, “We have yet to see a plan from the U.S. government or the G7 of the
needed ambition or urgency to make billions more doses and end the pandemic.”
The deal with Pfizer has the
potential to open the door to similar agreements with other vaccine
manufacturers, including Moderna, whose vaccine was developed with American tax
dollars — unlike Pfizer’s. In addition, the Biden administration has brokered a
deal in which Merck
will help produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and those doses
might be available for overseas use.
The United States has already
contracted to buy 300 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which
requires two shots, for distribution in the United States; the 500 million
doses are in addition to that, according to people familiar with the deal.
Neither Pfizer nor administration
officials would say what the company is charging the government for the doses.
Pfizer is also offering the Biden administration an option to buy another 200
million doses at cost to be donated overseas.
For Pfizer, the decision to sell
the Biden administration so much supply without making a profit is a
significant step.
Its vaccine accounted for $3.5
billion in revenue in the first three months of this year, nearly a quarter of
Pfizer’s total revenue. By some estimates, the firm earned roughly $900 million
in pretax profits from the vaccine during the first quarter.
But the company also faced
criticism that it was disproportionately aiding wealthy nations, even though
Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, had promised in January to help ensure
that “developing countries have the same access as the rest of the world.”
The 200 million Pfizer doses that
the Biden administration plans to donate amounts to about 7 percent of the
three billion doses that the company is expected to produce this year. Pfizer
expects to provide another 800 million doses to lower- or lower-middle-income
countries through other agreements with individual countries or Covax, a
spokeswoman said.
For Mr. Biden, the agreement shows
that his administration is willing to dip more deeply into the nation’s
treasury to help out poorer countries.
Last week, Mr. Biden said the
United States would distribute
25 million doses this month to countries in the Caribbean and Latin
America; South and Southeast Asia; Africa; and the Palestinian territories,
Gaza and the West Bank.
Those doses are the first of 80
million that Mr. Biden pledged to send abroad by the end of June;
three-quarters of them will be distributed by Covax. The rest will go toward
addressing pressing and urgent crises in places like India and the West Bank and
Gaza, administration officials have said. Many of the 80 million doses were
made by AstraZeneca and are still tied up in a complex review by the Food and
Drug Administration.
Mr. Biden has also committed to
supporting a waiver of an international intellectual property agreement, which
would make it harder for companies to refuse to share their technology. But
European leaders are blocking the proposed waiver, and pharmaceutical companies
are strongly opposed to it. The World Trade Organization’s Council for
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is meeting this week to
consider the waiver.
The president’s promise of vaccines
for the global market comes as he prepares to meet on Thursday with Prime
Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who has called on leaders to commit to
vaccinating everyone in the world by the end of 2022. Mr. Biden’s announcement
is likely to be welcome news for Mr. Johnson, whose critics have questioned
where the money will come from to meet his pledge.
“The truth is that world leaders
have been kicking the can down the road for months — to the point where they
have run out of road,” Edwin Ikhouria, the executive director for Africa at the
ONE Campaign, a nonprofit aimed at eradicating global poverty, said in a
statement on Wednesday.
About 64 percent of adults in the
United States are
at least partly vaccinated, and the president has set a goal of bringing
that number up to 70 percent by July 4. The pace of vaccination has dropped
sharply since mid-April, leading the Biden administration to pursue a strategy
of greater accessibility and incentives to reach Americans who have not yet
gotten shots.
In spite of those efforts, there
are unused
vaccine doses that could go to waste. Once thawed, doses have a limited
shelf life and millions could begin expiring within two weeks, according to
federal officials.
Providing equitable access to
vaccines has become one of the most intractable challenges to reining in the
pandemic. Wealthier nations and private entities have pledged tens of millions
of doses and billions of dollars to shore up global supplies, but the disparity
in vaccine allocations so far has been stark.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the
director general of the World Health Organization, warned this week that the
world was facing a “two-track
pandemic,” in which countries
where vaccines are scarce will struggle
with virus cases even as better-supplied nations return to normal.
Those lower-income countries will
be largely dependent on wealthier ones until vaccines can be distributed and
produced on a more equitable basis, he said.
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed
reporting from New York, and Michael D. Shear from Plymouth, England.
