Six months into the Biden administration, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the United States and around the world, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant. Meanwhile, as vaccinations stall in the United States, much of the world is still “desperate” for COVID-19 vaccines, says Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves. “We should be exporting vaccines rather than sitting on them and hoarding them,” he says. “If we don’t stop the virus all around the world, we’re not going to stop it anywhere.”
First is that we need massive scale-up of mRNA vaccines, as the new campaign suggests. We can do that in a couple of different ways, and we need to do them both at the same time. One is to invest in vaccine hubs around the world, like the one in South Africa that the World Health Organization announced a few weeks ago. That’s going to require an investment not just of money, but of time, people, effort, technology transfer for the recipes and all the other sort of technical know-how that’s involved in manufacturing these mRNA vaccines. But we can also produce at home, under the Defense Production Act, and set up a factory here or nearby in Canada, for instance, or in our partner nations in the EU, to scale up closer to home, where companies like Moderna have partners like Lonza, which is in New Hampshire, which could be supported through the Defense Production Act by $10 billion that’s already sitting in the Treasury from the American Rescue Plan Act for instances just like this to scale up mRNA vaccines. There’s been
— source democracynow.org | Jul 26, 2021