Biden's aim to vaccinate the world misses target amid logistics woes

WASHINGTON • US President Joe Biden's bid to vaccinate the world against Covid-19 is falling short, echoing the faltering campaign to inoculate Americans and raising the risk that more dangerous variants of the virus will yet emerge.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged in a virtual meeting with other countries on Monday that the world is not on pace to meet a goal of vaccinating 70 per cent of the entire human population by later this year, a target set last year by Mr Biden and the World Health Organisation.

Low-income countries - particularly in Africa - remain overwhelmingly unvaccinated.

Wealthy nations awash in shots were slow to equitably share vaccines; as they have, developing nations have run headlong into familiar challenges like hesitancy and logistical barriers.

Stubborn disparities are flaring up anew as effective therapeutic treatments are cleared for use.

Only about 54 per cent of the global population is vaccinated so far, says Our World In Data, a service by a British non-profit that advocates for international vaccination use to track progress. Signs are mounting that the problem is increasingly less about supply than last-mile distribution.

"The world is completely failing to reach the goals of getting the vaccine out to the people who need it," said Mr Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, an anti-poverty group. "We need a massive new infusion of vaccine distribution in the poorest parts of the world."

Biden administration officials believe supply is no longer the chief bottleneck and is out-pacing global demand. Instead, getting shots into arms is the chief concern, one US official said.

Covax, a global vaccine-sharing initiative, said this month that it has shipped half a billion doses donated by high-income countries.

The US has pledged to donate a total of 1.2 billion doses globally, and has shipped about 435 million so far, some of which went through Covax. Mr Hart said: "Dose-pledging is no longer the appropriate end of the conversation. We need to be talking about vaccine production all around the world."

There has also been little progress on easing patent restrictions on Covid-19 vaccines to expand international production, a strategy the Biden administration has announced support for but that is opposed by the European Union and shot makers.

In a potential answer to the troubled global campaign, a group of Texas lawmakers asked Mr Biden on Feb 1 to throw the administration's weight behind a new, patent-free vaccine, Corbevax, based on technology developed by Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine but not yet authorised for US use.

They say the shot could fill yawning demand internationally and counter China, which has sold its vaccines while at times using them as leverage for foreign policy aims.

Experts say there are probably enough doses of Covid-19 vaccines in the pipeline to give two shots to 70 per cent of the world's population, but not yet enough for booster shots as well.

The US and other wealthy nations have aggressively promoted boosters to their own populations, while insisting the domestic campaigns do not detract from international vaccination efforts.

Dr Peter Hotez, dean at Baylor's National School of Tropical Medicine and one of the researchers behind Corbevax, said the world still needs billions of vaccine doses to quell the pandemic.

And wider availability of vaccines based on older technology - as opposed to the more advanced messenger RNA technology that underlies shots by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna - could ease hesitancy, he said.

"The scope and the magnitude of the problem has not been adequately articulated," Dr Hotez said. "There's not quite that recognition of the urgency."

BLOOMBERG