Due to “reduced demand,” the United States and Pfizer will cut the number of vaccines they donate worldwide. However, Pfizer maintains that it will still provide the roughly 1 billion doses the United States has pledged to provide.
The Biden administration promised last year to give at least 1.1 billion doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to developing and middle-income nations.
Pfizer has released a statement claiming that the company donated over 400 million medicines to 79 countries.
The business has stated that by the end of 2022, 600,000,000 doses of vaccine will have been delivered for this program.
Pfizer claimed that while the company has “adequate supplies to complete the commitment for 1 billion doses to this program,” it is witnessing lower-than-expected demand in some low- and lower-middle-income countries due to hurdles in administration and vaccine hesitancy. Therefore, Pfizer and the U.S. government have revised the conditions of this contract to provide additional time for overcoming impediments to immunization.
The Hill has requested an explanation from the White House and USAID.
Stakeholders from all over the world have complained that wealthier countries are stockpiling pandemic resources like vaccinations. COVAX is a project that aims to guarantee universal access to coronavirus vaccines to counteract this trend.
Over 1.7 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been donated so far by the global vaccine project, COVAX, with the help of the World Health Organization (WHO), a co-leader.
In an anonymous letter, workers have asked Vice President Biden to fire the DHS inspector general.
The United States has cautioned China about supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine.
However, the same assessment also stated that there were innate problems with the program’s inception, such as the early funding and establishment period for COVAX, when demand greatly outpaced supply.
As a result of manufacturers prioritizing earlier bilateral customers for early supply and export restrictions that further hindered supply, COVAX did not receive the majority of the volumes scheduled to be available to it until the second half of 2021, according to the WHO report.
Reuters reported earlier this year that COVAX was considering slowing or reducing vaccine supplies to reduce vaccination dose waste. According to reports, COVAX wanted 400–600 million fewer doses than the total contracted to six pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer and Moderna.
