The Biden administration on Thursday announced that the U.S. will donate 25 million surplus doses of COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries, pledging to donate a total of 80 million doses by July. Economist Jeffrey Sachs says rich countries have enough production capacity to speed up vaccine distribution and immunize the whole world within the next year. “There’s massive supply, but there’s no plan for allocation,” he says. We also speak with South African health justice activist Fatima Hassan, who says the global vaccine imbalance comes down to political will. “Even now countries are still sitting around a table and talking and having long conversations instead of figuring out an urgent way to ramp up manufacturing, scale up production and get as many doses to as many people as possible all over the world.”
We need a global plan. We can estimate that there are hundreds of millions of doses being produced each month now, but there is no plan for getting them to the people in need. You quoted a study that said it would take — it could take 57 years. I would put it a different way. We could get comprehensive immunization around the world certainly within the next 12 months. Certainly. Let me underscore that. And it could be even faster, given the scale of production.
But we do not have an allocation plan. We don’t even have transparency right now. We have the companies that have been approved. How much are they producing per month? What contracts do they have? Where are these doses going right now? How should they be allocated across the world for prioritization? This is basic stuff, but the United States is not sitting down with China, with Russia, with the European Union, with the United Kingdom, with the WHO as the overall
— source democracynow.org | Jun 04, 2021