WASHINGTON — President Biden, who has pledged to fight the coronavirus pandemic by making the United States the “arsenal of vaccines” for the world, is under increasing criticism from public health experts, global health advocates and even Democrats in Congress who say he is nowhere near fulfilling his promise.
Mr. Biden has either donated or pledged about 600 million vaccine doses to other countries — a small fraction of the 11 billion that experts say are needed to slow the spread of the virus worldwide. His administration has also taken steps to expand Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing in the United States and India, and is supporting production in South Africa and Senegal to expand access to locally produced vaccines in Africa.
But with the administration now recommending booster doses for vaccinated Americans starting next month, outraged public health experts and many Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling on the president to move more aggressively to scale up global manufacturing. In an analysis to be published on Thursday, the AIDS advocacy group PrEP4All found that the administration had spent less than 1 percent of the money that Congress appropriated for ramping up Covid-19 countermeasures on expanding vaccine manufacturing.
Congress put a total of $16.05 billion in the American Rescue Plan this year, in two separate tranches, that could be used to procure and manufacture treatments, vaccines and tools for ending the pandemic. But PrEP4All found that all told, the administration had spent $145 million — just $12 million of it from the American Rescue Plan — to expand vaccine manufacturing. The bulk of that went to retrofitting production lines at Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, which is teaming up with Johnson & Johnson to produce one billion vaccine doses starting in early 2022.
White House officials dispute the $145 million figure, but did not respond to repeated questions about how the administration planned to use the bulk of the $16 billion. Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Senate health committee, has also asked for a more detailed accounting, her office said.
On Capitol Hill, 116 Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for putting $34 billion to increase vaccine manufacturing capacity in the upcoming budget reconciliation act. This month, they wrote to the president asking him to endorse the idea, but have not gotten a response, said Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois, who is leading the effort in the House.
“This lack of attention to executing a robust vaccination strategy abroad is arguably one of their biggest missteps with regard to Covid,” said Mr. Krishnamoorthi, who said he lost three members of his extended family in India to Covid-19.
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- One trillion dollar package passed. The Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan infrastructure package on Aug. 10, capping weeks of intense negotiations and debate over the largest federal investment in the nation’s aging public works system in more than a decade.
- The final vote. The final tally in the Senate was 69 in favor to 30 against. The legislation, which still must pass the House, would touch nearly every facet of the American economy and fortify the nation’s response to the warming of the planet.
- Main areas of spending. Overall, the bipartisan plan focuses spending on transportation, utilities and pollution cleanup.
- Transportation. About $110 billion would go to roads, bridges and other transportation projects; $25 billion for airports; and $66 billion for railways, giving Amtrak the most funding it has received since it was founded in 1971.
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James Krellenstein, a founder of PrEP4All and the author of its report, was more pointed. “If they don’t change course pretty soon,” he said, “the Biden administration is going to be remembered in terms that the Reagan administration is remembered today in not dealing with the AIDS crisis.”
Addressing the world’s coronavirus vaccine needs is a complicated endeavor, with many layers of challenges. Vaccine makers around the world, including those in Russia, China and India, have predicted a total of 12 billion doses by the end of 2021, according to Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center, which tracks vaccine manufacturing and publishes the Launch & Scale Speedometer website. Eight months into the year, an estimated five billion have been delivered.
Some manufacturers are falling behind. Novavax has had production problems. Johnson & Johnson, which initially planned for one billion doses this year, has made slightly more than 103 million, Mr. Krellenstein said, citing data from the scientific intelligence firm Airfinity. That is in part because its contract manufacturer, Emergent BioSolutions, ruined up to 15 million doses, prompting the Food and Drug Administration to shutter its Baltimore plant for three months.
If 12 billion doses were indeed produced and equitably distributed by year’s end, the world’s needs could be met. But, the Duke institute wrote, “those are both big ifs.”
Several other countries as well as the United States are already recommending booster shots, which will cut into the supply. And the virus changes shape so rapidly — the highly infectious Delta variant is now dominant around the globe — that the vaccines developed last year may soon be outdated, said Dr. Richard Hatchett, the chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which helps lead the international vaccine effort known as Covax.
In the short term, poor nations need doses, and Mr. Biden is correct when he says the United States has donated more than any other country. The United States has already donated 115 million surplus doses from the nation’s own supply, and has purchased 500 million doses from Pfizer and BioNTech to be distributed through Covax. With the United States planning for booster shots, one official said, there is no surplus right now.
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“Their financial contributions are huge — no other country has pledged as much as the U.S.,” Dr. Hatchett said. But, he added, “it’s not to say that they can’t and shouldn’t do more.”
Dr. Hatchett said he would like to see a more nuanced discussion of the logistics of not only making vaccines for poor and middle-income nations, but also administering them. The New York Times recently reported that Covax was having trouble getting those shots into people’s arms. Unused doses are sitting idle on airport tarmacs in poor nations that lack the money and capacity to buy fuel to transport doses to clinics, to train people to give the shots — and to persuade people to take them.
Mr. Biden took his first steps to address the vaccine shortage in March, when the White House announced the Merck deal as well as a partnership with Japan, India and Australia aimed at expanding manufacturing capacity. That included a pledge to help to Biological E, an Indian manufacturer, produce one billion doses by the end of 2022.
A White House official said the United States International Development Finance Corporation, which is making the investment, “expects to begin disbursing funds within the next several weeks.” The official did not offer specifics, or an amount.
Mr. Biden promised in June that the United States would begin an “entirely new effort” to increase vaccine supply and vastly expand manufacturing capacity, most of it in the United States. He also put Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, in charge of developing a global strategy. Mr. Zients pledged to work with U.S. manufacturers to “vastly increase supply for the rest of the world in a way that also creates jobs here at home.”
