On Monday, USAID administrator Samantha Power announced a plan for the United States to spend an additional $400 million to help increase vaccine access internationally. Power made the announcement just days after Vanity Fair revealed A $2.5 billion Plan to Thwart Omicron-Like Variants Is Stalled Inside the Biden Administration. We are joined now by Katherine Eban, who wrote the Vanity Fair piece. Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Katherine. Lay out what is happening. We are talking about a global pandemic.
However, what happened was even despite a gigantic pledge of vaccines, 1.1 billion doses—that is what the Biden administration has pledged—starting around this summer I learned through my reporting the health officials inside the Biden administration began to realize that they were having uptake problems in far-flung countries. They were dropping off crates of vaccines on airport tarmacs and lo and behold, without more logistical support, without boots on the ground helping to administer those vaccines, it was really almost impossible in some countries to turn those donated doses into shots in arms.
— source democracynow.org | Dec 07, 2021