As Virus Rages Abroad, Biden Promises to Ship Millions of Vaccine Doses

Senior Biden administration officials, asked by a reporter on Monday whether they had a “moral obligation” to ease the patent restrictions, said they had no new information to share. But Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, defended the president’s response.

“The United States has been one of the largest providers of assistance to address the Covid pandemic around the world, including to India, and we have obviously taken some significant steps over the last couple of days to address their immediate needs,” Ms. Psaki said.

The situation in India is especially dire. The country is experiencing what may be the worst crisis any nation has seen since the pandemic began. Hospitals are overflowing, and desperate patients are dying as they wait to see doctors. On Monday, India broke the world record for daily coronavirus infections for a fifth consecutive day, reporting nearly 353,000 new cases. And it added 2,812 deaths to its overall toll of more than 195,000, which experts say is likely to be a vast undercount.

“The crisis in India is a humanitarian disaster unfolding before our eyes,” said Tom Hart, the acting chief executive of the ONE campaign, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating world poverty. Based on an analysis of contracts signed by Mr. Biden’s most recent predecessor, the group estimates that the federal government has secured 550 million more doses than it needs to cover every American.

With worrisome variants spreading in the United States and around the world, public health experts say vaccinating people overseas is not only a moral imperative, but it is essential to protecting Americans. J. Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Mr. Biden needed to offer a more sweeping vision of how the United States can help the world.

“We are approaching these colossal, complex problems in an ad hoc, reactive, short-term manner,” Mr. Morrison said. He called the announcement on Monday a “further incremental step by the Biden administration toward fuller engagement internationally to address the dire vaccine gap.”

On a conference call with reporters on Monday, senior Biden administration officials said that in addition to the money pledged to the international vaccine initiative, known as Covax, the administration intended to spend $11.5 billion, appropriated by Congress as part of the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, on helping other countries fight the pandemic and administer vaccines.

But the officials would not address questions about patent waivers on vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna using sophisticated biotech methods. The Moderna vaccine was developed in partnership with the federal government.

The announcement on Monday about the AstraZeneca vaccine came only a day after the administration unveiled a series of steps to help India, including easing the way for the export of raw materials to make vaccine, and supplying that country with therapeutics, rapid diagnostic test kits, ventilators and personal protective gear.

Tim Manning, the White House Covid-19 supply coordinator, explained the plan on Monday on Twitter, writing that the administration had “diverted our pending orders of vaccine filters to India’s vaccine manufacturing effort,” which would “help India make more vaccine.”

But whether — or when — the AstraZeneca doses will reach India is unclear. Administration officials would not commit to giving them to any particular country. Ms. Psaki said that about 10 million doses could be released “in the coming weeks” if the Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccines made at the Baltimore plant, and that another 50 million doses were in various stages of production.

“Right now we have zero doses available of AstraZeneca,” Ms. Psaki said.

The New York Times has reported extensively on problems at the plant, which had to throw out millions of doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine from October to January, and it later discarded up to 15 million doses of the vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson, also because of concerns about possible contamination.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine — unlike those of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — has also not been granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. In announcing that they would release it, Biden administration officials were effectively conceding that they would not need the vaccine here in the United States.

Last month, Mr. Biden released a total of four million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine to Canada and Mexico — a move that generated controversy last week when the company disclosed that the doses had been made at the Emergent plant.

The president said last week that he was considering sending more overseas: “We’re looking at what is going to be done with some of the vaccines that we are not using,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure they are safe to be sent.”