Government rediscovers relationship with US over vaccine limitation

WASHINGTON.- After betting on China, Russia Yes Mexico, the government is now tabling its hope in America. The pink house took a turn and opened the game for expand the supply of vaccines in the country with negotiations with North American laboratories and negotiations with the government of Joe biden, to whom the two most senior figures of the ruling party, Cristina Kirchner and Alberto Fernández, they gave him nothing but praise in the last days, to the point of anointing him as another heir of Juan Domingo Peron.

The government seeks to reach an agreement in the confidential discussions which They aim to bring to the country the three vaccines applied in the United States, manufactured by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. At the same time, in Buenos Aires, this month they are awaiting confirmation from the White House: a donation of vaccines from AstraZeneca.

the activate the official strategy to strengthen the vaccination campaign and trying to contain a devastating second wave at the gates of winter began to be woven out of necessity, when deliveries initiated with the Kremlin, China, and with AstraZeneca in Mexico, where the assets of their vaccines made in Argentina, in mAbxience, the biotechnology of Hugo sigman.

As it advances in negotiations with North American private laboratories, Maison Rose draws lines with Biden’s government, which is preparing a donation of up to 60 million AstraZeneca vaccines. Definitions of dates and amounts are still awaited within the government, but they hope Argentina will enter the list of beneficiary countries. Biden promised in his last posts that The United States will be “an arsenal of vaccines” for the world, just as it was an “arsenal for democracy in World War II”. His government cStart by donating vaccines this month, anticipated the president.

The White House must first wait for the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA, according to its acronym), the equivalent of Argentina’s Angat, will conduct a vaccine quality review in the coming days. The Biden government, always cautious in its communications, awaits this step to give more details. The United States has 10 million ready-to-use doses, with an additional 50 million in various stages of production, according to the latest official information provided by the federal government.

Biden also announced this week that he supports a temporary patent suspension. vaccines. It is a historic turning point with an uncertain outcome: the decision was rejected by the pharmaceutical industry and met with resistance in Europe, where the German Chancellor Angela Merkel He said that “this is not the solution to make more vaccines available to more people.”

Biden’s signals come at times when The United States appears under strong international pressure to facilitate access to vaccines to the rest of the world Given the strong progress of the local vaccination campaign – Biden said he wants to reach July 4, Independence Day, with 70% of the adult population vaccinated with at least one dose – the slow progress of vaccination of Europe, the “vaccine diplomacy” deployed by Russia and China, and the devastation caused by the new variants of the coronavirus in India and Latin America.

In Argentina, the last movements of the ruling party ended up turning the government’s gaze on Washington. Last month left a host of signs of rapprochement: the trip of Juan González, Biden’s envoy to Latin America, and Julie Chung, the region’s top diplomat, to Buenos Aires, the participation of Alberto Fernández at the climate summitsummoned by Biden, and, this week, the waste of praise that Fernández and Cristina Kirchner devoted to the economic policy of Biden. Alberto Fernández came to call him “Juan Domingo Biden”.

Very far back in time, Cristina Kirchner’s suggestion, September 2014, that it could suffer an attack orchestrated by the United States. “If something happens to me, let no one look east, look north”said the vice president at the time. Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president, and the bilateral relationship was going through its worst moment since the return to democracy. The country was in “technical default” in the midst of a struggle with “vulture” funds, and lines with Washington were frozen.

The government’s priority is now expand vaccine stock, a necessary condition to break the pandemic and finish putting the economy back on track, a the ruling party’s obsession with the upcoming legislative elections. But in the coming months, the government also needs the support of the White House to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to refinance the $ 45 billion debt that the government of Mauricio Macri has left.