White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki in the White House press room, Washington.EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / Reuters
The United States will send 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine to other countries, the White House adviser on the coronavirus response group, Andy Slavitt, announced on Monday.
The announcement will materialize in the coming months, once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorizes the use of the drug, still pending in the US, and millions of drugs have been manufactured.
Several international organizations have been pressuring the Joe Biden Administration for weeks to donate part of its leftover vaccines to countries where the pandemic is out of control or do not have enough vaccines to protect their population.
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"To be clear, at this time, we have zero doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine available," Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman, said Monday.
In a press conference he added that after the FDA review, scheduled for the next few weeks, there could be 10 million doses available.
Then, probably in May or June, the remaining 50 million can be distributed in batches.
"So this is not immediate," he added.
The announcement came after Biden spoke with the prime minister of India, a country where, amid a shortage of medical supplies, 354,000 cases have been recorded on Monday, a world record. The White House published in a statement that the world power promised that both countries "will work closely together in the fight against Covid-19."
Just over half of the adult population in the United States has at least one dose of one of the three vaccines offered in the country: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which this weekend was distributed again after of 11 days of restriction for the rare and remote cases of thrombi. By July, the world powerhouse will have a surplus of 300 million injections, according to a report from the Duke Center for Global Health Innovation based on the contract the US government signed with AstraZeneca.
In this context of surplus vaccines in the US, the international community has asked Washington to be more generous with poor countries.
The United States has yet to define with which countries it will “share” the leftover doses of AstraZeneca.
Last month, Washington donated about $ 4 million to Mexico and Canada, who have requested its help.
"We are in the planning process right now," Psaki clarified when asked about the fate of the drugs.
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