Coronavirus: US to distribute AstraZeneca vaccine, government hopes Argentina will be included

WASHINGTON – The White House will begin distributing up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the coming weeks after it passes a review by the federal government’s drug regulatory agency. The Alberto Fernández government maintains contacts with the Joe Biden administration and hopes Argentina will be one of the beneficiary countries.

The move comes in the middle of a Growing global unrest over vaccine abundance in the United States, where more than half of the adult population has already received at least one dose of one of the federally approved vaccines – Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – and the population vaccination campaign is progressing steadily. But the distribution of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the AstraZeneca laboratory, whose production has encountered difficulties in the United States, will not begin until it has passed a quality review by the Food and Drug. Administration (FDA, for its acronym in English), something that should happen in May, or no later than June.

Once the plan is in place, the government of Alberto Fernández expects Argentina to receive some of the vaccines distributed by the Biden government, which has yet to define the list of countries where it will send the vials and how the distribution will work. .

Argentina’s Ambassador to Washington, Jorge Argüello, works in contact with the White House, the State Department and AstraZeneca with the mission to increase the supply of vaccines for Argentina, which has become one of the priorities of his administration before the scourge of the second wave of the coronavirus in the country. Negotiations in Washington also cover the other two vaccines approved in the United States, those from Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna.

The Biden administration had already donated four million doses of the vaccine to Mexico and Canada. The AstraZeneca vaccine is widely used around the world and is one of the main bets for several Latin American countries, including Mexico and Argentina. Delivery from the United States, which plans to donate the vaccines, could begin as early as next month.

“Given the strong portfolio of vaccines already available in the United States that have been approved by the FDA, and since the AstraZeneca vaccine is not licensed for use in the United States, we do not need to use the AstraZeneca vaccine here for the next several years. White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients told AP, anticipating the news. “Therefore, the United States is looking for options to share AstraZeneca doses with other countries as they become available,” he said.

Andy Slavit, the White House’s chief coronavirus pandemic response architect, said on Twitter that the Biden administration would distribute 60 million doses. However, Presidential spokeswoman Jen Psaki warned in her usual press conference that the delivery mechanism has yet to be defined and that the United States currently has around 10 million doses in its vaccine stockpile. AstraZeneca vaccine, with an additional 50 million. along the way, at different stages of production. The vaccine will not begin to be distributed until the FDA has verified that it meets its quality requirements and conditions.

“We are working on what the process will look like and we will be looking at a variety of partner country options and of course a lot of that will be done through direct relationships,” Psaki said.

White House officials said in a conference call with reporters that these roughly 10 million doses could be released once the FDA approves, which could happen “in the next few weeks,” they said. they asserted. And the remaining 50 million extra doses which are in various stages of production could be completed in stages in May and June. In total, the White House hopes to have 60 million doses of AstraZeneca that the United States could share with other countries as they become available in the coming months.

“As these doses become available, plans will be finalized as to where they will be shipped,” official sources said.

The White House expects to have enough vaccines to achieve herd immunity by next summer. The United States vaccines on average more than three million people per day, and it is expected that in the coming weeks, as more people are vaccinated, the rate will actually start to slow as the peak of the campaign will have been reached.