Government accelerates negotiations with United States to receive part of vaccine donation announced by Joe Biden

Alberto Fernández made the decision to dictate a strict quarantine for nine days with two central goals: reduce the circulation of citizens -and therefore the virus- e intensify the vaccination plan by taking advantage of the remaining injections that Argentina still has but, above all, by making the most of the shipments that should arrive in the coming days.

From Monday, and throughout the week, the first plane should arrive with part of the 4 million AstraZeneca vaccines and two more flights from Russia with doses of Sputnik V Component 1. But at Casa Rosada, they are accelerating another negotiation that will be essential for the delivery of vaccines in the months to come and they hope that they will serve as a cushion for the hardest moment of the winter: the donations announced by Joseph Biden to the struggling countries cope with the pandemic.

In the geopolitical power struggle involving United States, China and Russia Regarding vaccines, the US president announced that his administration will make a donation 80 million doses and that later he will not use this gesture “to ask for favors”.

This package will include 60 million vaccines from Oxford-AstraZeneca and 20 million other American laboratories: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, which require a single dose. Anglo-Saxon injection is not yet authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). For it does not apply in the United States -and will not apply once approved- and the donation operation cannot yet start.

With this process currently on hold, the government took the opportunity to start speeding up negotiations and trying to ensure that he received a good shipment of doses. Conversations are in charge of Argentina’s Ambassador to the United States, Jorge Argüello, who, on the orders of Alberto Fernández, met Wednesday with Gayle Smith, coordinator of international policy at the White House.

Argüello told Alberto Fernández that, at most, the donations would start in six weeks. AstraZeneca doses are in the final authorization phase: in Baltimore, there is a warehouse with 30 million vaccines waiting to be distributed after being approved by the FDA. Therefore, what Argentina seeks to anticipate is the method Biden will use to give the injections.

For the moment, we know that the distribution criteria will be decided with the World Health Organization Covax Mechanism, which coordinates the global effort to ensure it is done fairly. But it is also being studied to realize bilateral state-to-state agreements. Here is a legal issue that arises from the Trump administration that Biden will need to address.

When vaccine production begins in the United States, the former Republican President signed a contract with the laboratories by which the US government has undertaken not to donate or resell the vaccines. Given this, the legal shortcut Biden is considering is to donate. as loans which would mean that recipient countries would have to return the vaccines. But the United States is aware that this round trip will not take place and neither is it in their plans to claim them.

The other stumbling block is how to define the number of doses corresponding to each country. When Covax steps in, he has his own proportional terms that he balances. But in the case of bilateral loans, each government will push for a higher rate. That is why Alberto Fernández considers speeding up negotiations a top priority and has asked Argüello to come to the State Department.

What the government wants to avoid is to impose a criterion that is based on the size of the population, because it estimates that a lower percentage of vaccines will reach them compared to other countries. What Arguello asked Gayle Smith is that the proportion of infections and deaths be factored in, clues in which Argentina is more complicated.

With more than 300,000 positives and more than 70,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, Argentina is located third in the world with more daily cases after India and Brazil and fourth for deaths, after India, Brazil and the United States.

According to the information collected by the data unit of Infobae -based on figures provided by Johns Hopkins University- our country ranks fourth in terms of mortality per million population in South America. On this scale, in which the raw number (number of deaths) is put in relation to the population density of the country (millions of inhabitants), the list is led by Brazil, which has 2,084 deaths per million inhabitants; Peru, 2,070; and Colombia, 1642. Below, Chile, 1491; Bolivia, 1,195; Ecuador, 1,162; Paraguay, 1,090; Uruguay, 1021 and, finally, Venezuela, 84.

A final point that North American authorities must define is what the logistics will look like. Arguello also spoke about it with Smith and tried to give him a favorable panorama towards Argentina: He explained that the country has planes to collect them and guarantee the cold chain. Not all nations have these conditions and that is why the United States will have to see how to resolve them. The most likely option is that you offer to transport them but you will also have to consider the shipping costs.

Faced with the shortage of vaccines, Alberto Fernández must balance the international map and the offers of power between the main powers to position himself as the leading suppliers of doses in the world. Until, his main partner and the one who supplied the most to Argentina is Vladimir Putin, but there were also significant shipments from China of Xi Jinping. Now he will go and seek Biden’s help but it will come as an unprecedented move so far in the administration of the pandemic: free of charge.

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