Joe Biden has increased the doses of vaccines he will send abroad to 80 million

the President of the United States, Joe Biden, plans to ship 20 million more coronavirus vaccines overseas by the end of June, including, for the first time, vaccines licensed for home use, where supply begins to exceed demand.

This Monday, Biden will announce that it will ship 20 million doses of vaccine from Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. o Johnson & Johnson, plus 60 million doses of AstraZeneca Plc that she had already agreed to send to other countries, according to a senior government official familiar with the plan.

The official, who asked not to be identified before the president’s expected comments, stressed that the measures are only the first step, as the country focuses its attention on combating the pandemic abroad. Previously Biden promised that the United States would soon become an “arsenal” of the world’s vaccine supply.

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Biden will also announce that he will put Jeff Zients, who has been the White House’s covid response coordinator, in charge of his efforts to fight the pandemic around the world, the official said. Zients will work with the National Security Council and other agencies to direct doses overseas.

The announcement will mark a turning point in the pandemic and a turnaround in the strategy of the Biden administration. Initially, the United States government, under two presidents, claimed almost all of the first hundreds of millions of doses of locally produced vaccines. This approach has allowed Biden to advance what has been one of the most successful national immunization efforts in the world, but it has fueled inequalities between countries that can produce their own vaccines and those that cannot.

Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are licensed in the United States, but the AstraZeneca version is not yet. It is not yet clear which countries would receive the new US shipments.

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Mexico and Canada have already received doses from the US stockpile of AstraZeneca, and Pfizer has started shipping doses of its US-produced vaccine to countries such as Mexico, Canada and Uruguay. The US national vaccination campaign is starting to run out of recipients. This Monday, the country is close to crossing the threshold of 60% of adults who have received at least one dose.

Vaccinations needed

Meanwhile, dozens of low-income countries, and even some developed countries, are struggling to get their own vaccines.

Covax, the global program to facilitate the purchase and access of vaccines for low-income countries, faces aid shortage announced of up to $ 4 billion for Covax.

Biden said he would only share doses purchased from the United States once there is enough supply to meet local demand. Manufacturing errors at a Baltimore plant resulted in a contaminated batch of Johnson & Johnson vaccine and significantly slowed production of the vaccine, once seen as a mainstay of supply for the United States. Unidos relied almost entirely on contributions from Pfizer and Moderna.

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The US president has faced pressure to do more to help the world as he The United States is eliminating almost all mitigation measures, such as the use of chin straps, and other countries are trying to quell new epidemics and new variants with limited vaccine supplies.. Biden has launched what he calls a “new phase” in his pandemic effort, turning to the hard work of persuading the most undecided Americans to get vaccinated as demand dries up among those keen to get vaccinated. get vaccinated.

The number of cases in the United States continues to decline, with 16,857 new cases recorded on Sunday, the lowest daily total since March 2020, although Sunday is generally the lowest daily total of any week. The vaccine rate has slowed by more than a third from the previous month and is now around 2 million doses per day.