America’s vaccine surplus is staggering. It’s a moral outrage to not share faster with a virus-ravaged world.

The contrast is growing more galling by the day.

In the US, more than half of adults have received at least one vaccine dose, Covid-19 transmission is the lowest it’s been in 11 months, and many Americans are partying and traveling and reveling in their new vaccinated status.
Meanwhile, thousands of unvaccinated people in less wealthy countries — from India to Brazil — are dying every day amid overwhelming surges of Covid-19. Delhi’s crematoriums have run out of room. Sao Paolo has resorted to exhuming old graves to make space for new bodies.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22432536/biden-donate-vaccine-doses-india-brazil

“We have a split screen. The US is looking great — everyone can get a vaccine! At the same time, in India, Southeast Asia, everywhere, I have health care worker friends who may not see a vaccine until 2022 or 2023,” said Craig Spencer, a professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University. Nearly a dozen countries are “vaccine deserts” where nobody, not even doctors treating Covid-19 patients, has gotten a single shot.

Biden has promised to do that. In April, he pledged to send 60 million AstraZeneca doses to virus-ravaged countries. But it’s now mid-May, and doses are still sitting in a stockpile. Although they have to pass a federal safety review before being exported, and it’s obviously crucial to ensure safety, experts still say Biden’s plan to donate these doses over the next several months will be too little, too late.

The US can afford to give much more, much faster. After all, roughly 73 million doses are already sitting in the US stockpile, according to CDC data. By July, Duke University researchers estimate, the US will likely have at least 300 million excess doses — and that estimate is assuming that the US will retain enough doses to vaccinate the vast majority of children. In other words, every eligible or soon-to-be-eligible American could get vaccinated, and there would still be 300 million doses left over — practically enough to give an extra dose to every person in the country.

William Moss, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said it would be “a very obvious decision” for the US to donate all its doses of AstraZeneca since that vaccine is not even authorized for use in the US. Another promising option would be to donate Johnson & Johnson’s doses in spades. “The advantage of getting that to countries like India is that it’s a single dose, and the cold-chain requirement is less stringent,” he said.

Moss, Prasad, and Spencer all argued that the US should also send Pfizer and Moderna doses to countries like India — even if contractual language says doses manufactured in the US have to be given to Americans. They want the Biden administration to ignore that language, given the scale of humanitarian crisis we’re witnessing.