To loud fanfares, Biden vowed to make the U.S. the world's vaccine "arsenal," but of the more than $16 billion that Congress appropriated to strengthen the response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration has spent less than 0.01% of it to expand global vaccine manufacturing, according to Playing Fiddle While the World Burns, a new report released Thursday by PrEP4All, a global health justice organization dedicated to increasing access to lifesaving medications.
The relief package signed by the president in March allocated $16.05 billion to boost the production of coronavirus tests, vaccines, treatments, and other tools to end the public health emergency, PrEP4All found that the Biden administration has so far spent just $145 million—only $12 million of it from the American Rescue Plan—to ramp up vaccine manufacturing.
Most of that money was used to retrofit production lines at Merck, the pharmaceutical company working with Johnson & Johnson to produce Covid-19 vaccines.
If Biden spent the remaining billions of dollars earmarked for pandemic counter-measures—funding that PrEP4All says is "more than sufficient to build mRNA vaccine production capacity in six months"—the U.S. could make 16 billion doses and "vaccinate the entire world in a single year."
James Krellenstein, PrEP4All co-founder and managing director, said in a statement. "Unequal access to vaccines threatens lives everywhere. So long as Covid-19 spreads worldwide, even worse variants than Delta will emerge."
Krellenstein called the Biden administration's failure to adequately invest in producing a greater supply of doses "inexplicable given the current crisis in global vaccine access," and he emphasized that time is of the essence.
"It is imperative that the Biden administration immediately scale up vaccine production for the billions of people who don't have access," Krellenstein continued. "The health of our nation and the world depends on it."
Medicare for All advocate Ady Barkan, described the Biden administration's refusal to develop and implement a comprehensive plan to ramp up global vaccine manufacturing as "probably the most important issue in the world right now."
Biden's White House officials say that it is not possible for them to scale up production quickly, in part because of a scarcity of raw materials, and that doing so would take three to five years.
Dr. Tom Frieden, who directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama-Biden administration, dismissed the claim as "nonsense."
"People say, 'Oh, it's going to take months,'" Frieden said. "Well, Covid is with us for years. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
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