Activists send requests for vaccines to the home of Biden’s chief of staff

A small group of longtime AIDS activists, tired of what they see as President Joe Biden’s failure to scale up the manufacture of coronavirus vaccines for global use, have laid a fake mountain of bones in front of the home of Ron Klain, his chief of staff, on Wednesday to represent the lives they say were lost due to the president’s inaction.

Activists, some of whom were veterans of much larger protests at the National Institutes of Health over 30 years ago, had previously made similar requests in private phone calls with administration officials, including Dr Anthony Fauci, a target of early AIDS. protests which later became the activists’ ally.

But the calls got them nowhere, they said. So they decided to try more old-fashioned and more straightforward tactics. The mountain of bones, they said, was done by a decorator in New York City. They planted it in front of the driveway of the next door neighbor next to Klain to avoid running into the Secret Service agents guarding Klain’s house. The officers finally politely asked them to leave.

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“No one wants to be here outside Ron Klain’s house, protesting a president most of us have voted for,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a public health researcher at Yale University whose activism on behalf of people with AIDS led to a career in academia and a 2018 MacArthur “genius” scholarship. “But we have tried everything else.

He defended the decision to report to the private home of an unelected civil servant.

“What is it – 4 million dead, 6 million dead, 10 million dead – where we can stand on someone’s lawn and hold them accountable?” Said Gonsalves. More than 4.7 million people are known to have died worldwide from COVID-19, but analyzes of excess mortality around the world suggest the real number is much higher.

“They represent the public,” Gonsalves said of the officials. “We pay their salaries. They don’t listen to the American public. They don’t listen to the global audience. They don’t listen to scientific advice. So it’s the least we can do. “

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In an emailed statement, a White House spokesman said the administration had taken “decisive and urgent action to save lives now,” including purchasing more than a billion doses of vaccine in giving overseas and working with manufacturers in India and South Africa to increase vaccine manufacturing.

“This is gunfire coming out now and in the months to come,” spokesman Kevin Munoz said. “We are pushing the world” to step up and do more immediately as well, he added.

The protest at Klain’s home in suburban Washington was one of two “vaccine fairness protests” Wednesday by AIDS groups including Prep4All and Right 2 Health Action. The other was at the home in Boston of Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, whose COVID-19 vaccine was developed with the support of American taxpayers.

With less than 10% of people in many poor countries fully vaccinated and a shortage of doses contributing to the suffering of millions, pressure has increased on both Biden and the drugmakers, including Moderna, to provide more inexpensive vaccines to the world.

Biden said the United States is doing more than any other country to fight the pandemic. Last week, at a COVID-19 virtual summit he called on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting, he announced that his administration had purchased an additional 500 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be donated abroad, bringing the total to about $ 1.1 billion.

But activists want the president to put more pressure on companies to share their intellectual property with other vaccine makers and establish manufacturing centers around the world.

“This is not just a topic of political discussion; it is truly life or death for millions of people around the world, ”said James Krellenstein, who led the Klain protest and drives a U-Haul truck carrying the Mountain of Bones from New York to Washington. “For all of us, the COVID summit was the last straw, where essentially the sum and the substance of the most powerful country in the world was, they will place another order of 500 million vaccines.”

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